Asus ProArt B660-Creator D4 Review: Pros on a Budget

If you’re a creative professional looking to build your own Alder Lake PC and not break the bank doing so, the Asus ProArt B660-Creator D4 is here to satisfy your needs. Priced under $200, the board offers a professional appearance (no RGBs!) and the connectivity you’d expect for a budget-minded creator board. You get three M.2 sockets, a Thunderbolt header support, dual ethernet ports and even USB-C DisplayPort for connecting a monitor. In all, this is one of the least expensive ATX ‘pro’ series boards available.

Other boards around the same price are just as capable, but are focused more on general use and gaming, so you lose some of the flexibility the Pro board offers (DisplayPort USB-C and Thunderbolt header support, for example). Connectivity aside, the black-on-black board with gold accents/branding doesn’t stick out (no RGB LEDs) like a lot of these gaming boards, but is intended for a professional who may not want gowing bling out of the box in the first place.

Performance on the ProArt was average overall, with some heavily multi-threaded benchmarks running a little slower than most other DDR4-based motherboards. The Procyon Office benchmark was the bright point, and gaming performance was solid too. While a decent performer, at default settings, the processor throttles in heavily multi-threaded situations due to high temperatures. In order to get the most out of your mighty Intel Core i9-12900K, you may have to use a voltage offset to prevent the processor from throttling.

Below, we’ll dig into all the details to see if this budget creator board earns a spot on our best motherboards list. But before we do, here’s a list of specifications for the ProArt B660-Creator D4 from the Asus website.

Designed for creative professionals, the ProArt Series, according to Asus, focuses on reliability and flexibility compared to most other boards. Where you get an RGB light show on some boards, the ProArt series looks more at what creatives need for their workflows. The all-black board sports the ProArt name artfully placed on the large VRM heatsink and the plastic shroud covering it. The chipset heatsink is a large square with additional ProArt branding. The slots and sockets are also black, outside of the primary PCIe slot with its EMI protection (silver) surrounding it.  The board won’t bring attention to itself, but if you’d like to add RGBs, you certainly can.

Along the top edge, in the middle, are three (of seven) 4-pin fan headers (CPU_FAN/OPT, AIO_PUMP). All fan headers are Q-fan controlled through the BIOS or Asus software. The CPU headers automatically detect if the attached device is PWM or DC controlled; the rest require a manual adjustment. All headers output up to 1A/12W. While this is good for fans and most AIOs, it may not be enough for a high-powered pump in a custom water cooling loop. But again, that’s not the kind of rig this board was designed for.

Off to the right of the LGA1700 socket are four unreinforced DRAM slots that lock at the top. Asus lists support for DDR5-5333+(OC) and a capacity of 128GB. We didn’t run into any issues with either of the kits we used to test.

In the right corner are two (of four) RGB headers. In this location is a 4-pin RGB and 3-pin ARGB headers with two more ARGB headers along the bottom. Continuing down the right edge, we first run into the Q-LEDs that check key components (CPU, DRAM, VGA, and Booting devices) during the POST process. Next, a 24-pin ATX for board power and a 6-pin PCIe connector for the supported PD 3.0/QC 4.0+ fast charging technologies (up to 60W). Last is a front panel USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 (20 Gbps) Type-C header.

Power delivery for the B660-Creator consists of 12 power stages for Vcore. Power gets sent from the EPS connector(s) to the DIGI+ VRM chip (ASP2100) 10-channel controller and on to twelve 50A Vishay Sic654 MOSFETs in a “teamed” configuration. The 600A available to the processor isn’t a lot, but it handled our power-hungry i9-12900K at default speeds.

On the bottom half of the board, starting on the left, is the audio section that’s separated from the rest of the board by a visible line running up to the rear IO area. Hidden under the shroud is a Realtek ALC897 codec along with a few dedicated audio capacitors. This isn’t the latest or greatest, but it should be adequate for the creatives it’s marketed towards (and most users in general).

In the middle of the board sit four M.2 sockets (three Key-M, one Key-E for a Wi-Fi adapter) and three PCIe slots. Starting with the storage, the top M.2 socket, M2_1, supports up to 110mm PCIe 4.0 x4 (64 Gbps) drives and sources its bandwidth from the processor. M2_3, the heatsink-free middle socket, has the same specs/support as M2_1, except its lanes come from the chipset. The bottom socket, M2_3, runs at PCIe 3.0 x4 (32 Gbps) speeds and also supports larger 110mm modules. The Key-E socket supports CNVi-based Wi-Fi modules (not included).

Your primary video card goes in the reinforced full-length PCIe 5.0 slot on top. The second full-length slot runs at PCIe 3.0 x4 speeds and the closed-end PCIe x1 slot runs at 3.0 x1, both sourcing their lanes from the chipset. There is some lane sharing as PCIe x1 shares bandwidth with M2_2. PCIe x1 disables when M2_2 runs at PCIe x4 mode. Just past the chipset heatsink along the edge of the board is the 19-pin USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) front panel connector and four SATA ports. The SATA ports support RAID0/1/5/10 modes.

Across the bottom are several headers, including USB ports and RGB, and even a 13-pin thunderbolt header for add-in cards. Below is a complete list, from left to right:

Front panel audio

COM port

13-pin TB AIC header

COM/debug header

(2) Chassis fan headers

(2) 3-pin ARGB headers

2–pin temperature sensor header

(2) USB 2.0

Clear CMOS header

4-pin Chassis Fan header

Front panel

There rear IO plate on the B660-Creator comes pre-installed for simple installation. The IO plate has a black background and gold port labels that match the ProArt theme and are easy to read. There are nine USB ports here: one USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) Type-C, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) and four USB 2.0 (480 Mbps) ports. That should be plenty for most users. Video outputs consist of an HDMI v2.1 a, DisplayPort (v1.4) input and a USB-C port that supports DisplayPort output. There are two Ethernet ports (2.5 GbE Realtek and 1 GbE Intel), while the audio stack is composed of five analog plugs plus SPDIF audio stack. This is all pretty standard, outside of the DisplayPort/USB-C display options.

Asus’ ProArt B660-Creator D4 BIOS sports a black and light-blue theme along with a bright white font that’s  easy to read. The BIOS is loaded with options and menus, and the most frequently accessed items are easily accessible and not buried several layers down. There’s also an Easy Mode that’s more of a dashboard with limited functionality. We’re fans of the Asus BIOS and its logical layout. It has everything you need and then some to tweak your motherboard and component settings. And if you want to know how to access your BIOS (from any system), we can help!

Asus has applications designed to control the motherboard’s various functions, ranging from RGB lighting control to audio, system monitoring, overclocking, etc. Instead of plodding through each application as if it changes for each review, we’ll capture several screenshots of a few major utilities. In this case, here’s a look at Ai Suite 3, Armoury Crate, Sonic Studio III Suite and the Realtek Audio application.

Our standard benchmarks and power tests are performed using the CPU’s stock frequencies (including any default boost/turbo), with all power-saving features enabled. We set optimized defaults in the BIOS and the memory by enabling the XMP profile. For this baseline testing, the Windows power scheme is set to balanced (default), so the PC idles appropriately.

To get the most out of the Intel Alder Lake chips, you need to be on Windows 11 with its updated scheduler. In most cases, Windows 10 performs well. However, some tests (Cinebench R20, Corona and POVRay) take a significant hit. In short, if you’re going with Alder Lake, you must upgrade to Windows 11 for the best results across the board. That may change with patching and updates in the future, though.