MSI B660M Mortar WiFi Unboxing – Great Budget Option For 12th Gen

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How’s it going everybody welcome to we do tech and my review of the MSI B660 Mortar WIFI DDR5 alongside the i5 12400 CPU, which is a nice “budget” combo.

Pricing wise the B660 Mortar WIFI DDR5 version is retailing for $180 or R5000 here in South Africa which is around $50-$70 or R1500 to $2000 cheaper compared to a similar Z690 board. This is great if you were planning to go for a None K CPU and didn’t want to pay the same price for just the motherboard. I’m glad there is a more budget option but also sad because compared to the previous MSI B560 Tomahawk which is the one just above the Mortar that was R1000 cheaper 7 months back. But thats only for here in South Africa at the moment, not in the US. So that kinda sucks for us here.

Moving on to the design, it still keeps the black and silver color scheme or black on black as you get 2 options depending on the model. It is also a mATX board so a bit shorter than standard ATX boards so you lose some PCIe slots. But it does seem to have some decent VRM heat spreaders with it covering the IO.

For the CPU, you again have the LGA1700 socket used for 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs only. B660 boards cant not overclock the CPU, well it can but well not go into that. But you can overclock your memory. I am quite surprised that we get dual 8pin power connections for the CPU. So theoretically it should be bale to supply enough power to even a i9 under load. The VRMs also look quite good with a 12 + 1 +1 power delivery system.

So for memory, you have 4x DDR5 DIMM slots however you do get DDR4 options of the mortar as well which is slightly cheaper and you will save quite a bit on memory then as well. But back to the DIMM it supports a max capacity of 128Gb and speeds up to a crazy 6200 MHz with an XMP overclock.

The Z690 boards supported PCIe 5 and there are some B660 boards that support it as well, but from what I can see no MSI B660 boards support PCIe 5. This is perfectly fine for me as it is a bit of an unusable feature currently. But for the Mortar you get 3 slots with the top being PCIe 4, the bottom PCIe 3, and the x1 middle one also PCIe 3.

As for storage, you get 2x PCIe 4.0 slots both with heat spreaders.

Then you also get SATA 6 ports for additional storage. SATA8 will be unavailable when installing M.2 SATA SSD in the second M.2 slot.

Now as for the IO you get 4x USB 2 ports, a Display port v1.4, a HDMI v2.1, 3x USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps Type A ports, a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 20Gbps TypeC port, you also get a single USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C port. For networking you get a 2.5Gbps ethernet port and Wifi Wi-Fi 6E 6GHz and bluetooth 5.2 wireless connections. Finally you get your standard audio connections.