DON’T BUY A Z790 BOARD – BUY THIS INSTEAD!!
Don’t waste your money on an expensive Z790 board if you aren’t buying basically anything over than the 13900K – buy one of these instead. This is a B760 board – this specific one is the Asus TUF B760-PLUS WIFI D4 – but the majority of these new B760 boards are what you should be looking at. They are somewhat more limited, like you can’t overclock your CPU, and come with less I/O overall, but for 99% of gamers you won’t mind. In fact, the extra cash you save buying one of these can be used on a higher end GPU, more storage, or even a higher end CPU instead netting much better performance overall.
So, what do you get with one of these? Well, you still get PCIe Gen 5. Admittedly it’s only to the top X16 slot where you’d plug your GPU into which is generally less useful at the moment than an M.2 slot, but being realistic it’s not going to be useful for another 3-5 years anyway so that’s fine. Plus, it’s not like you’ll be lacking for M.2 slots either, with this board rocking a total of three. One at the top directly connected to the CPU at Gen 4 speeds, then a further two connected via the chipset also at PCIe Gen 4 speeds. That’s likely to get bottlenecked if you are reading or writing to both at the same time, but the chances of that happening are slim to none so it’s fine.
As for CPU support, these boards will work with any of the Alder Lake or Rocket Lake desktop chips. That includes the new lineup of 65W locked chips like the 13400 – which now features 4 efficiency cores, albeit with an increased 154W maximum power draw to match its higher 4.6GHz boost clock speed. Despite the added E-cores, those chips are still likely to be the ones to get, along with a board like this. If you did want to drop in something as power hungry as the 13900, these boards are still very much capable of running them at full speed. This TUF PLUS board is using a 12+1 phase VRM design which is more than enough for even the 13900K – although of course since this is the B series chipset it’s limited to its stock clocks only. Still, you won’t have any problems with any of these boards for power delivery.
You’ll also be happy to know that these boards still support both DDR4 and DDR5, or more specifically you can buy DDR4 or DDR5 versions of B760 boards. This one is a DDR4 board, which is great for someone who is looking to upgrade their existing system and cut costs by re-using the same RAM, whereas if you are building new I think I’d generally swing towards splashing out a touch more for a DDR5 board and DDR5 RAM, as that means you’ll be able to carry that forward to future upgrades too.
You might be thinking – why not just get one of the older B660 boards instead, seeing as they also support both generations of Intel’s hybrid CPUs, and are likely to be cheaper anyway! While that’s plenty true, and especially if you are opting for a cheaper 12th gen chip instead of the brand new 13th gen options, that’s perfectly fine. There really isn’t much of a change between the 6 and 700 series boards really, the only detractor from a B660 board for a 13th gen chip is they’ll need a BIOS update to support the newer chips, which likely haven’t been done on the boards currently sitting on retailer’s shelves. That can ruin your day when you finally get all your parts in, build it all up, only to find you need to rip the motherboard out and send it back to get it updated. The B760 boards won’t have that problem at all, and, like for like, the B660 version of this TUF PLUS D4 board is only £10 less than the new B760 version. Compare that to the £320 the Z790 version cores and it pales in comparison.
One thing that is a little lacking on the B760 board is its I/O. You’ve only got 5 USB A ports and one Type C port on the back, although you do have both a USB 3 and Type C front panel header on the board so your case can take up the slack there. You do still get 2.5Gb ethernet and WiFi 6 built in here though, which is rather nice, alongside full 7.1 audio outputs and SPDIF out. If you compare that to a Z790 board you’ll find a few more ports on that, along with more internal connectivity too. You do still get plenty of RGB headers though!
The price difference is incredibly hard to ignore. £320 for a Z790 board, £210 for this B760, and while sure you do drop the overclocking support and a couple of ports here and there, realistically that’s £110 you can just outright not spend, or spend on potentially a full tier higher GPU, CPU, more RAM, more storage, or even a better monitor. That’s a considerable amount of money to essentially waste on a feature the vast majority of gamers never actually touch. So, to wrap up, buy this, not that. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
