Page 3 - Physical Look - Hardware, Board Layout
The ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 is a standard ATX board at 30.5cm by 24.4cm. It is the company's latest motherboard in the ProArt lineup, and it fits the design theme of the series very well. ASUS has been using flat black soldermask on their lineup for a very long time, and I found its understated appearance to be quite attractive in my windowed chassis. All of the components are in various shades of monochrome with flat gold stripes over the left VRM heatsink and back panel cover, "Power Up Your Imagination" text on the top heatsink, and ProArt branding on the chipset heatsink. Even the capacitors are black in color, which makes it very sleek in my opinion. The ProArt B660-Creator D4 is a mainstream performance board, but it certainly carries the classy vibe of a high-performance model. While aesthetics is not really an issue when it comes to internal components of a computer compared to the way the board is built and how well it performs, surprisingly it can be a deciding factor for some users. Of course, the comments on the look are just a personal opinion. We also see alloy chokes and high temperature capacitors that has gone through a 168-hour durability test for long-term dependability.
As you can see in the photo of the ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 above, the heatsink configuration is extensive. There are large VRM heatsinks for the MOSFETs and chokes around the processor socket, which we will cover in just a short moment. Both PCIe 4.0-based NVMe M.2 slots have included heatsinks. Lastly, a simple passive cooler is placed over the B660 chipset, since it only has a 6W TDP. The ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4 will work just fine even in cases with not a whole lot of airflow. We will do some temperature testing later on in this review.
The CPU power connectors are located horizontally near the top left corner as with most motherboards. There are two connectors here, an ATX 4-pin and EPS 8-pin, to give your processor the juice it needs. It is fairly cramped in this area, but it is one of the better ones I have seen, since it is located right on the edge of the board with nothing in between. This leaves sufficient room for people with average sized fingers to unlatch their cables. You should not have a whole lot of issues getting in and out of this area unless you have a large heatsink sitting over your processor or a large water cooling radiator at the top of your case.
Three 4-pin fan headers are located above the top VRM heatsink, labeled CPU_FAN, CPU_OPT, and AIO_PUMP. This means it will support up to two cooling fans and an all-in-one cooler pump. Every header has a dedicated integrated circuit chip for heat and voltage protection.
Above is a shot of the motherboard at the back. The design is relatively simple and clean, which great for those thinking of adding aftermarket CPU cooling solutions. A standard Intel backplate is found here, and all LGA1700 aftermarket coolers should be designed to work with this backplate in place. As always, some sockets and headers use through-hole connectors, as shown in our photo above; SMT or surface-mount technology is generally less capable of withstanding higher mechanical stress required for certain use cases like memory slots.
The LGA1700 processor socket is the usual array of items within close proximity. These are components relating to the CPU voltage regulator circuit as well as the two corresponding heatsinks. The heatsinks are reasonably low profile despite being large, so I have experienced no problems in installing large heatsinks such as the Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black. The ProArt B660-Creator D4 features a Digi+ EPU and 12+1 50A power stage design for steady and precise power delivery with fast transient response to your CPU. A 4-pin chassis fan header can also be spotted approximately southwest of the CPU socket.
Four RAM slots are placed pretty close to the CPU socket, but there is only so much room on the motherboard. Most modern RAM should have low enough profile heatspreaders and most modern coolers are designed with adjacent memory modules in mind, so you should not have any clearance issues. The slot closest to the CPU socket is DIMM A1, followed by A2, B1, and B2. All of them have a fortified metal divider for increased strength.
The ATX 24-pin power connector is placed along the side of the motherboard as far as standard design is concerned. Above the ATX 24-pin power connector are four LEDs to indicate the CPU, memory, graphics card, and boot device status for easy diagnosis. An AURA ARGB Gen 2 header is next, followed by an AURA RGB Gen 1 header around the corner. Below the ATX 24-pin power connector, there is a 6-pin PCIe connector to supply up to 60W to the front panel USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C connector and a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C header.
In the above photo, we can have a clearer view of the USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C header. Next to it is a USB 3.2 Gen 1 header angled perpendicular to the motherboard, followed by four standard SATA 6Gb/s ports native to the chipset also angled perpendicular to the motherboard for optimal cabling convenience. These SATA ports support RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. Adjacent to the SATA ports is a SPI TPM header. The soldered BIOS chip can be found behind the SPI TPM header. All in all, this is a pretty good layout in my opinion, and it is optimal as far as cabling is concerned with everything placed along the edge.
There are three PCI Express expansion slots on the ProArt B660-Creator D4. ASUS claims the top slot is reinforced for increased strength. The one at the top is a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot provided by the CPU. The second slot is a full-size PCIe 3.0 slot, but only has four lanes of bandwidth provided by the B660 chipset. The last slot is also provided by the B660 chipset, but only has one lane of PCIe 3.0 shared bandwidth. This bandwidth is actually shared with the middle M.2 and Wi-Fi Key E slots; more on this in just a moment.
There are three M.2 storage slots on this motherboard, which provides a solid amount of NVMe storage if you want to load your PC up with an array of fast SSDs. All of them support sizes up to 22110 and has a nifty mechanism for locking SSDs in place tool-free. While it works well, I would much prefer the latch to be made out of metal rather than plastic. The top and bottom M.2 slots are PCIe 4.0-based, where the top one has four lanes supplied by the CPU and the bottom has four lanes supplied by the chipset. Both of them come with a beefy heatsink. The middle one is a PCIe 3.0-based slot with up to four lanes of bandwidth from the chipset. However, if something is in the Wi-Fi Key E or bottom PCIe slot, the bandwidth will be reduced to two lanes only. The Wi-Fi Key E 2230 slot is located next to the bottom M.2 storage slot.
An array of internal headers can be found at the bottom of the ASUS ProArt B660-Creator D4. From the left, we have front panel audio, serial, Thunderbolt 4, two 4-pin PWM, two AURA ARGB Gen 2, thermal sensor, two USB 2.0, clear CMOS, another 4-pin PWM, and front panel I/O. The CMOS battery is placed between the second and third PCIe slot, but it is unlikely you need to pull it out since there is a clear CMOS header. ASUS has done an excellent job of organizing all these headers in an accessible and user-friendly manner in my opinion.
At the back, there is a dedicated audio zone electrically separated from the rest of the components to reduce noise. A thick line for the audio guard path is on the soldermask to give the user a visual cue of this design. A Crystal Sound-branded cover is placed over the Realtek 7.1 24-bit/192 kHz audio codec. Further sound quality optimization is made with a power pre-regulator, de-pop circuit, audio-grade capacitors, and audio shielding.
The back panel has an integrated rear I/O shield and offers a generous array of modern external connectors. There is a total of four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports; the first two adjacent to the Gigabit Ethernet jack on the first block, and two adjacent to the 2.5G Ethernet port on the second block. The 2.5G Ethernet is powered by a Realtek RTL8125BG controller, while the Gigabit Ethernet is provided by an Intel I219-V chip. Additionally, there are two USB 2.0 Type-A ports and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port. The USB Type-C port has DP Alt Mode support that provides DisplayPort 1.4 output for up to 8K resolution at 60Hz. They are all native to the Intel B660 chipset. The USB ports can be disabled or set to read only for security.
We have two additional video connectors in addition to the USB Type-C port. This includes an HDMI output and DisplayPort input. The DisplayPort input is used to connect to your video card's output for the Thunderbolt controller to pair with your discrete graphics. The rest are audio connectors based off the Realtek codec. An optical output can be seen in addition to the five standard 3.5mm analog jacks.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Bundle and Chipset
3. Physical Look - Hardware, Board Layout
4. BIOS and Test System
5. Benchmark: AIDA64
6. Benchmark: Cinebench R23
7. Benchmark: PassMark PerformanceTest 10
8. Benchmark: PCMark 10
9. Benchmark: 3DMark
10. Onboard Sound Frequency Analysis
11. Thermal Measurements
12. Conclusion
