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Comment by Johanx64 | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't matter what kind of perf you get out of these chips if the 12th gen mobos with proper power delivery and vrms are expensive as hell.

It's those expensive b660 mobos which throw out the whole value proposition of these budget CPUs

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You don't need expensive power delivery for a 60 W i3. A basic $150 B660 board will do just fine.

You can get a B660 for 110$ on Newegg right now, that's pretty cheap.

But that's by no means cheap. 12100/12300f CPUs should have been paired with mobos that cost 60-70eur tops. Instead you have to get a mobo which costs as much or more than the CPU itself

>>A basic $150 B660 board will do just fine

That's crazy compared to AMD though. You can get a £40 B450 board for AMD and it will run anything up to and including the 5950X without any issues. That's where the problem is - you save a 100 on the CPU, but spend a 100 more on the motherboard.

Why would you pair an i3 with a B660? Get an H610 for ~70$.

No one should be purchasing a H610 without being fully cognizant of what they are giving up. Namely a drastic reduction in PCIe lanes, zero USB 3.2 20Gbps ports, and no memory overclocking, which in Intel land usually means no XMP.

If you are buying a 120$ CPU for a budget build (which realistically is what most people going for an i3 are building) then you don't need those feature. You can have a dirt cheap CPU with a dirt cheap mobo to splurge on the best GPU you can fit in your budget.

It would make no sense to buy an i3 and then pair it with expensive memory. 3200Mhz is plenty.

> 3200Mhz is plenty.

Yes, and the vast, vast majority of 3200MHz memory only has that available via XMP profiles. If XMP doesn't work, you have 2133MHz memory.

alder lake officially supports 3200mhz, no xmp needed.

I could be completely off base here. But from what I have read, H610 does not allow setting any memory timings or speed outside of the JEDEC profiles, XMP is not JEDEC so it doesn't count.

On some 3200MHz GSkill RAM I have in a desktop in front of me, that means on this kit a H610 would only run 1067MHz @ 15-15-15-36-50. Instead of the XMP profile I run now which is 1600MHz @ 16-18-18-38-56.

Yep, same with Corsair memory modules - the full speed is only available through an XMP profile. No XMP = massively reduced ram speed.

I doubted for a second but it seems that H610 does support XMP but only up to CPU max speed (3200Mhz for Alder Lake) which means that it should work as intended.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1411005-memory-speed-on-alde... (Linus Tech Tips, but it was the first link that came out when googling).

Having a B660 board but doesn't even guarantee you USB 20Gbps ports, you can easily get a b660 board with just usb 3.2 gen 1 aka 5gbps ports only.

It's a shitshow.

I agree that it's very hard for consumers to understand. But to be honest how often do you need high speed usb? How many >5gbps thumb drives exist? Even if they do exist how often are you transferring enough data to care?

You're still talking about minutes at most to dump your whole phone.

backup hard drives are the main place where it matters I transfer around my roughly 500gb home folder roughly once a month over USB. that takes a while.

I'm more talking about 12400f where peak powerdraw with Max turbo boost is not insignificant.

With 12300f peak powerdraw under sustained boost probably isn't more than 90W, so the shitty vrms of cheapest h610 could probably work just fine

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