Check your processor: i5-12400, i5-12600K or Ryzen 5 5600X?
Check your processor: i5-12400, i5-12600K or Ryzen 5 5600X?
It seems you're looking at upcoming MSI releases. They're reportedly developing a motherboard that could let you boost the 12400 with BCLK on DDR4, enabling overclocking. The 12400 would likely surpass the 5600 significantly, reaching around 5.1GHz in air tests, offering a strong performance upgrade over the 5600.
Prices need to drop, Intel seems marginally quicker in this case, possibly the 13th gen will use the same boards just in case, I believe the benefit lies entirely with Intel.
Even though the 12400 is secured, I was considering switching to a Z690 for future upgrades toward a 13th gen i7. That sounds like a long shot right now. Do any Z690 boards offer the same possibilities? I haven’t heard much about overclocking non-K SKUs.
First thing that I should point out is that you can put a 13700 on a B660 board without any issues, the only factor you need to worry about is if the VRM is enough for an upgrade, and the B660M Mortar WiFi (the non MAX version that's currently out and will be very similar to the MAX version) has a very strong VRM that should be more than enough for what you can put in the socket. Unless you want to get an unlocked chip to overclock (again, not really a point if you can do BCLK overclocking instead) or you want a feature that's only available on the Z690 chipset (it does have more IO, though whether or not you'll use it is a different story), there's not really a reason to get a Z690 board over a B660 board. For BCLK overclocking locked chips, yes it there are other B660 and Z690 boards that allow for this, but there are very few and they're all overly expensive. For context, in order to do this, it requires an external clock gen, which isn't particularly necessary since the one built into the Alder Lake CPUs is already pretty good. The only reason to have it (before it was figured out that you can overclock the non-K chips) was for going for frequency validations since you can change it on the fly a lot easier. ASUS figured out sometime during the board development time that you can actually adjust the BCLK externally on the non-K CPUs to overclock the CPUs pretty far. Unfortunately, because they're ASUS, they think overclocking features like these only belong on their higher end ROG boards, and their ROG boards have been steadily increasing in price over the past ~5 years to the point where they make absolutely no sense for anyone to buy and the ones that have it only support DDR5 because the people who want to buy it are the ones who'd invest in DDR5. They're still better than the other manufacturers with clock gens that only put it on their absolute top end boards like the Godlike or Aorus Xtreme and their XOC boards like the Tachyon, Unify series, and Aqua series that support it (again, before this was discovered by the public about a month after the locked CPUs were released, these were the only boards that it actually made sense to put it on), but the cheapest board that supports it is the Strix B660-G or B660-F (I forget which one is cheaper), a ~$300 motherboard that only supports DDR5. You'd be better off dropping it down to a Z690-A Pro and a 12600K if you want to overclock since it'll be the same price and you'll get a faster chip overall by doing that (plus you get to avoid the mess that is current DDR5). Because all the manufacturers figured Intel would break it, and there would be no way to advertise it without Intel suing the crap out of them, no one wanted to go through the effort of redesigning one of their lower end DDR4 motherboards to support BCLK overclocking. Fortunately, Intel hasn't gone after anyone yet, and MSI has pretty much gone "screw it" and actually seems to be designing one and preparing it for release. Their original intention for redesigning it (speculative, I don't work at MSI, know anyone who works at MSI, or even particularly like MSI, this is just what I'm guessing) to add PCIe Gen 5 to that board, and they figured if they were redesigning it they might as well add a clock gen to it (it's a super cheap part), and then advertise it with leaks and hope people like me notice said leaks and recommend that particular board. If that board gets released, there's a very good chance that I'll buy it and a 12100F, then overclocking the crap out of it for fun (I'd say it's probably working) Edited May 31, 2022 by RONOTHAN## rephrased some stuff