The Intel B560 Motherboard Overview: 30+ Budget Models Starting from $75
by Gavin Bonshor on March 29, 2021 7:00 AM ESTGIGABYTE B560 Aorus Pro AX
Moving on to GIGABYTE's B560 stack, we have its premium (at the time of writing) ATX sized offering via the B560 Aorus Pro AX. It's a quintessential Aorus board with a similar design we've seen from GIGABYTE over the last couple of years. It is using an all-black PCB, with black power delivery heatsinks, with a black metallic-looking rear panel cover that features an Aorus Falcon logo. There's a pair of M.2 heatsinks, with a black and grey chipset heatsink which has a diagonal-like design. GIGABYTE is advertising a 12+1 power delivery with 50 A power stages and uses a single 8-pin 12 V ATX CPU power input.
GIGABYTE has included a total of three full-length PCIe slots, including the top slot operating at PCIe 4.0 x16, the middle slot at PCIe 3.0 x4, and the bottom slot at PCIe 3.0 x1, which seems odd that it's not a smaller slot. For storage, there are three M.2 slots including one PCIe 4.0 x4, and two PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA slots, with six SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. At the time of writing, GIGABYTE hasn't unveiled its memory QVL list so support is listed at DDR4-3200, but we know the four slots can accommodate up to 128 GB.
The rear panel includes one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, one USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and two USB 2.0 ports. Sitting below the USB 2.0 ports is a PS/2 combo port while networking support consists of an Intel I225-V 2.5 GbE controller, with an Intel AX200 Wi-Fi 6 CNVi which also offers support for BT 5.1 devices. A total of six 3.5 mm audio jacks are powered by Realtek's latest ALC4080 HD audio codec, with two video outputs including a DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4.
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limitedaccess - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
Rocket Lake CPUs have 20 PCIe (4.0) lanes off the CPU. This a departure from previous generations in terms of lane count. Comet Lake (and older) for Intel have 16 lanes off the CPU.4 of those lanes are connected to the "first" m.2 slot of B560/Z590 motherboards. 10th gen CPUs don't have those lanes even as PCIe 3.0. Previous generation motherboards have all their m.2 slots using lanes connected to the chipset.
jrbales@outlook.com - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
Thanks for the explanation. My AMD X570 has PCIE 4 lanes from both CPU and chipset, so this is my first build wheres I'm running up against this limitation. Now it all makes sense and fortunately, I did place my Samsung 970 EVO into the 2nd M.2 slot. Thanks again! And old dog CAN learn something new!ScottSoapbox - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
There are three typos in the first paragraph that Word or a browser would catch if you took 10 seconds to check. Hint: words need spaces between them.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Thursday, April 8, 2021 - link
am I the only one who noticed the CMOS battery on the wifi thing in the asrock board?? lolutmode - Saturday, April 10, 2021 - link
has reaktek fixed speed dropping issue in their RTL8125B 2.5G NICmammuthus - Sunday, June 20, 2021 - link
Guys, witch one I should choose between ASUS ROG Strix B560-I Gaming WIFI and MSI MPG B560I Gaming Edge Wi-Fi?aigo - Thursday, July 29, 2021 - link
There is no sound through HDMI ports regardless of the OS; Linux, Windows. Definitely not a multimedia board, and neither it is for gaming.dwoodcock - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
After messing about with this board all day trying to get RAID working I find out it doesn't support RAID at all!!!BadConfiguration - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
Hi Gavin, will the M.2_2 (marked ultra m2) use the pcie lanes from chipset ? Or would it use the pcie lanes from cpu ?