I just recently upgraded my gaming rig to an Intel i5-12400F, coupled with RTX3060Ti and the MSI MAG B660M Bazooka (DDR4) and am currently having a blast here no regrets.

First up, I have seen a lot of Youtube reviews concerning the best 12th (as well as 13th) Gen motherboards and currently the top spots are being held by MSI, doing exceptionally well on the high end with their Tomahawk (best performance, tested on Cinebench with one the lowest temps, and even their budget mobos especially the Pro-B660M-A. Here's a good youtube roundup review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3o1Ebk_jCA

For me, I chose the Bazooka due to it's mid tier price range, it has excellent VRAMs and heatsinks and has a really nice aesthetics design- which couples well with my full RGB setup. Other brands such as Asus,Gigabyte and Asrock are ok too, but their prices are really high and doesn't offer the bang-to the buck performance I'm looking for.

Whats your opinion for those who are looking to upgrade or have upgraded on what mobos are good for 12th and 13th Gen CPUs?

Here's my new setup

All in all costed me only around 4k (custom build). Everything is new, except a 1TB SSD I brought over from my previous rig.


This post has been edited by Kenngan7012: Dec 2 2022, 06:50 PM

Nicely specced tho a tad too much RGB for my taste!. Haha. But it looks nice and tidy inside. Well done.

I have a similar new build incoming soon. 12700F, RTX3060ti, but with Asrock B660m PG Riptide. Not really into its BCLK OC feature but more for the RAM stability as AFAIK this is the only config I seen with 4x DDR4 3600 running at XMP with no stability issues. I was contemplating the MSI Pro B660m-A (a cheaper less blinged version of ur Bazooka) after seeing Hardware Unboxed and Premium Build reviews but forum user experiences indicates RAM stability could be an issue If I full loaded with 4 sticks. Goldfries & Tech Yes City review of the Riptide board sold it for me.

This post has been edited by babylon52281: Nov 13 2022, 11:29 AM

Not sure about your setup. But it looks like you are trying to future proof your system more? A i5-12400F is more than capable to max out the graphic card for a 3060Ti and running only about 50-60% max.

Also been using the Bazooka for about 2 weeks now. No thermal throttling issues or heat issues I have encountered so far playing Cyberpunk on max/ultra settings in 1440p. I mean I would have went with the Mortar instead (it's a better option than the Bazooka) but I slightly went above my budget, so you can actually check that out too.

I have no experience with Asrock's motherboards though, so I cannot comment on that. Also, since I'm more of a practical person per se, I would always go for the "best bang for the buck" more than brand. I have been into pc gaming like more than 20+ years and have changed my rig a couple of times and so far I kinda like MSI for their motherboards. BIOS is user friendly, their aesthetics is really good and price is reasonable for the performance too. Also for the best "bang for the buck build" the MSI Pro B-660M-A is really the killer... saw that on tons of reviews. I reckon it would carry your setup to even onto the intel 13+ series, since they both use the same Mobos.

As an additional note, I wrote the review because MSI had a shoutout reward- I essentially got an extra of RM86 for my Steam Wallet for it too. Thank you MSI.. That essentially is even more cost savings for me

Just be aware that all Alderlake Non-K SKUs have locked VCCSA voltages so only 3200Mhz RAM is guaranteed (in Gear 1) to work.
You can try running 3600, depends on silicon lottery. People have more success with 3466 Gear 1.
Don't run it in Gear 2 as that would lower performance.

The Mortar was a bit OP for me too! (pricing & performance). If you'd ask me 2-3 months back I'd build my system around the MSI mobo, great reviews all round, just the issue with 4 RAMs is a bit of a kicker. Still I'd wholeheartedly recommend either MSI B660m mobos (Pro & Bazooka) to any AL builder on a budget if they only want to run 2 sticks of RAM.

Your right about my future proofing, I plan to use it for next 7-9 years but ain't gonna upgrade the CPU or mobo, so I'd like a little headroom with the CPU for future upgrade of GPU (perhaps a RTX6700 or RTX7700 + 4K monitor).

Yup. Well aware on the locked VCCSA issue. I read even getting XMP 3200MHZ could be an issue!

As for silicon lottery Im hoping by now with RP out, they'd further refined the silicon process and get better quality chips out compared to when AL first came.
Of course TYC's Brian had reviewed his i7 12700 with this Asrock B660m PG riptide mobo running 4x 3600MHZ @G1. So with luck I could run that setup too.
Worse come to worse I will manually dial back to under 3600 until I reach some stable level, the good thing with this Asrock mobo is that it has fine increments in RAM speed settings so I won't loose too much if I manually setup just about stable, altho I am hoping I could get XMP out of the box.

bro, minr sharing where u bought ur rig?
and ur gpu brand? nice aio there!

How is your 12700 with 3600MHZ RAM? Are you able to run them at 3600MHZ G1 mode?

No luck with silicon lottery.

3600 G1 hardcrash my OS that I have to restore from image. 3466 G1 will boot into windows but during memtest86 will pop up some errors, which other memory testers did not show.

Techspot has said as much, for nonK ADL & RPL the highest can go is 3466 G1.

Ya, may be only 0.1% sil lottery for non-K 12th gen processors to get DDR4 3600MHZ XMP G1. So what are your stable RAM XMP settings now? Using the asrock b660m board?

Set at XMP except downtune to 3466MHZ at G1. So far its not giving any problems except in Memtest86 but I might want to try see what timings will pass that. Using Asrock B660M PG Riptide
https://forum.lowyat.net/topic/5339043