TECH NEWS – Expect to see some budget solutions for the new Alder Lake motherboards.

The Intel 600 series has mainstream and budget solutions, as the trio of H670, B660 and H610 is quite an extensive offering. The first Intel B660 and H610 motherboards have already leaked, but we’re now hearing prices. The H670s will be a bit delayed, but the B660 and H610 “boards” won’t have to wait much longer. Taobao, a Chinese online shopping site, has already started listing motherboards. They are individual sellers, so the motherboards may even reach the shops lower than the price they list.

The motherboards from Gigabyte and ASRock have popped up. The cheapest is the H610M-HDV/M.2, which is 549 Renminbi, or $86. 7+1 phase VRM design, powered by an 8-pin connector, two DDR4 DIMM slots, one M.2 Ultra slot, 1 PCIe x16, 2 PCIe x1, and only one heatsink, on the H610 PCH. Essential ports and IO, nothing more, but the pricing isn’t bad.

Then the ASRock B660M-HDV popped up for RMB 639/$100. It’s similar to the H610M-HDV but with an extra Hyper M.2 slot and more USB ports. The price difference is understandable due to the more powerful chipset and additional features. Then there’s the B660M PRO RS and B660M-HDC for 699 RMB/109 USD, but the vendor didn’t provide any pictures of these motherboards. It probably has better power delivery and IO than the HDV version. The two Gigabyte motherboards are B660M DS3H and D2H, both DDR4, 755 RMB/118 USD. They have multiple heatsinks on the VRMs and PCH, one M.2 slot, but can accommodate four DDR4 DIMMs and robust IO ports.

All but the H610 series motherboards support memory tuning (XMP 3.0). With IO, the H670s will have a maximum of two PCIe Gen 5 slots (x16 or x8/x8 electrical). The others will have only one Gen 5. All but the H610 boards will have a CPU-attached NVMe (Gen 4.0 x4). DMI? 4.0 x8 link on the H670s, 4.0 x4 on the B660 and H610. Gen 4 lanes? 12 on H670, 6 on B660, none on H610. Gen 3: 12, 8 and 8, respectively.

Pricing should be pretty fair, at least in the US (they’ll all be cheaper than the Z690 series), and DDR4 support is understandable since DDR5 is either too expensive or too scarce. Intel’s 12th generation non-K Alder Lake processors have also leaked (we wrote about them), and they are not weak either. The new 600 series motherboards from ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock and Biostar are sure to be unveiled at CES 2022…

Source: WCCFTech