With the release of Intel's tenth generation processors last year, now that the tenth generation processors have begun to enjoy some discounts, it is the right time to start. The Z490, B460 and H410 chipsets are introduced to match the ten generation processors. The B460 chipset, which is positioned in the mainstream, is an ideal choice for users who do not overclock. Asustek's TUF GAMING series also launched the new B460 chipset "Small Steel Cannon" TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner, which has a good performance with strong performance and luxurious materials.

Appearance appreciation

The overall packaging style of ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner is the same as that of the heavy gunner family.

ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy artillery adopts B460 chipset and integrates the good genes of B450M heavy artillery. It has good materials and configuration, and supports AURA SYNC Shenguang synchronization, which can easily create a light pollution host.

In terms of appearance, ASUS B460M heavy artillery player PRO follows the black and yellow color matching of the TUF GAMING family, and has the "ballistic camouflage" coating to create a strong style of mecha fighting. It is made of M-ATX board, with a size of 24.4cm * 24.4cm, providing a new choice for users to create compact chassis. On the motherboard, RGB light effects have also been added, so that users who like to play with lights can also join the motherboard.

ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO Heavy Gunner has an Intel LGA 1200 interface base, which supports the tenth generation of Core processors.

This motherboard uses 4+4+1+1 phase power supply, DIGI+VRM digital power supply control technology, and also adds a large area of cooling fins, and uses a high thermal conductivity special inductance heat conductive patch, which fully covers MOSFETs and inductance to ensure efficient and stable operation of the system. The motherboard PCB has an additional 2Oz (70um) copper foil layer design, allowing faster heat transfer, It improves the power supply stability of multi-core high-frequency CPUs. Since the B460 chipset cannot overclock the CPU, the power supply is already quite luxurious. It is not a problem to support processors such as i5 10600K TDP up to 125W through stable power supply.

The B460 chipset is covered with a metal heat sink printed with the TUF logo, which can provide a good heat dissipation guarantee. Reliable and stable is the consistent pursuit of the TUF GAMING esports family.

Asustek TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner has four memory sockets that can be grouped into two channels, supports DDR4 2933MHz, and supports up to 128GB of memory.

The ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner has two PCI-E3.0 X16 slots and one PEI-E X1 slot. The PCI-E interface uses the ASUS SafeSlot high-strength slot, which uses one-time molding technology to provide stronger retention and shear resistance, effectively ensuring that the slot will not deform. One of the slots also uses a metal strengthening layer, which greatly increases the robustness.

In addition, there are two PCIe 3.0 × 4M.2 interfaces. The first interface supports SSDs with SATA and NVMe protocols, and the maximum speed can reach 32GB/s. However, when an SSD with SATA protocol is inserted, the first SATA interface will fail. After the second M.2 interface is plugged into the SSD, the following PCIe interfaces will fail. The first M.2 interface also has a heat sink, which can provide a good heat dissipation effect for SSDs.

It has six SATA 3.0 connectors, which are distributed on the motherboard in a flat and upright form, and can adapt to different forms of hard disk cables.

The ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner supports ASUS AURA SYNC Shenguang synchronization, and is equipped with a 5V 3Pin interface and two 12V 4Pin interfaces, which can meet the access of the first and second generation RGB devices. However, the 5V 3Pin interface is still less, and my water cooling and fan can be accessed at the same time with the help of the HUB splitter. The second generation of AURA Shenguang Sync can be linked with devices that support this technology, such as graphics cards, memory, keyboards, mice, chassis, and external RGB light strips. The programmable technology can support the independent control of the light, dark, and color of an LED light. It has higher playability and can create a cooler RGB host.

This motherboard also carries ALC S1200A audio chip, and adopts professional audio design such as audio protective cover, audio split line, high-quality Japanese audio capacitor, which can provide 108dB signal to noise ratio output and 103dB signal to noise ratio input. The sound quality performance is excellent. The game sound effect system jointly developed by ASUS and DTS provides multi-channel surround virtualization for stereo headphones and immersive gaming experience.

The I/O backplane interface includes a PS/2 keyboard and mouse interface, two USB 2.0 interfaces, four USB 3.2 Gen 1 interfaces, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 interface (Type-C), one DP1.4 interface, one HDMI1.4b interface, one 2.5G network cable interface and a set of audio output interfaces. ASUS has finally reduced the DVI interface and added a more practical DP interface, which is a performance of keeping pace with the times.

In the era when gigabit LAN has been popularized, the ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy artillery player is in the forefront of the era and equipped with Realtek 2.5G network card. Compared with the traditional gigabit network card, the speed has doubled. Although 2.5G broadband and routers have not been popularized yet, the price of 2.5G switches has been popularized, and with 2.5G NAS, It can have faster file read and write speed. This motherboard can also use the Turbo LAN software to set the priority of software access to the network, reduce the game delay, and let us enjoy the game.

Moreover, the stainless steel I/O interface panel with integrated design on this motherboard is not only beautiful and durable, but also avoids the embarrassment of forgetting to install the I/O panel after the motherboards are installed.

Installation process

to configure

CPU: i5 10600KF 6 core 12 thread 4.1GHz

Motherboard: ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO Heavy Gunner

Memory: Zhiqihuan Light halberd RGB light bar DDR4 3200 16G

Hard disk: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 512G+3T Seagate Cool Fish mechanical hard disk

Graphics card: Yingchi Hall of Fame GTX 1060 6G

Radiator: Joshberg Light Shadow 240

The CPU chooses i5 10600KF. Although the B460 chipset cannot support overclocking, the i5 10600KF is 1.2 GHz higher than the main frequency of the i5 10400F. The price difference is only 200 yuan, which is nearly half higher than the main frequency. Even if overclocking is not possible, it is worthwhile. In addition, the TDP of i5 10600KF is up to 125W. You can also test whether the ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner can support more than 65W CPU.

The memory is the Zhiqi Fantasy Light halberd RGB light bar DDR4 3200 16G, 16G memory, which can ensure that the memory will not lag behind, and the performance gap between single and dual channels is not very large, which can also facilitate the future upgrade of 32G memory.

Samsung 970 EVO Plus 512G with M.2 interface and NVME protocol are adopted for SSD, and the highest sequential read/write speed can reach 3500MB/s and 3300MB/s, which can meet the test requirements.

Installation completion drawing, in cooperation with JOSEPH Light&Shadow 240 water cooling and Yingchi 1060 6G graphics card. Because the ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner uses the M-ATX board type, it takes less space in the chassis. I can consider changing a smaller chassis to save desktop space.

Master Lu configured the whole machine. From the configuration information, it can be seen that the network card equipped by ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner is a 2.5G network card.

performance testing

In everyone's mind, the B460 chip is suitable for using i3 or i5 10400 CPUs that cannot be overclocked, but now the i5 10600KF is also very affordable, which is only 300 yuan more expensive than the i5 10400F, but the benchmark frequency has increased from 2.9 to 4.1, and Remax is also higher. So if the budget card is not tight, many people will choose i5 10600KF. The ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner has strengthened its power supply and can support the 125W TDP of the i5 10600KF. Let me test that the ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner can give full play to the full performance of the i5 10600KF without overclocking.

From the information displayed by the task manager and CPU-Z of WIN10, it can be seen that this CPU has reached 4.47GHz to 4.48GHz, basically reaching the level of 4.5GHz of i5 10600KF full core RF.

From the full load test of the CPU, we can see that the CPU has been in the highest and highest frequency state all the time. This motherboard can ensure stable operation even in the case of long-term copying. Therefore, this motherboard can fully support the use of i5 10600KF.

In the CPU-Z test, the single core processor scored 515.8 points and the multi-core processor scored 3975.3 points.

In CINEBENCH, the CPU multi-core performance is 8875 points, and the CPU single core performance is 1215 points.

Master Lu's comprehensive performance score is 34283.

ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner supports DDR4 2933MHz, but i5 CPU can only support 2666MHz, so the memory frequency can only reach 2666MHz. Because I am a single channel memory, the read/write speed of memory is slightly lower. However, the speed of the CPU's level 1, 2, and 3 caches is slightly higher than my previous i7 6700K.

Test the read/write speed of the SSD. The performance speed of this Samsung 970 EVO PLUS hard disk has also been improved compared with that of the previous Z270. Theoretically, the M.2 interface of the Z270 motherboard is also PCI-E 3.0 x4, and the speed should be the same. However, on the ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy shooter, the continuous read/write speed of this SSD has indeed increased by about 500MB/s.

In PCMARK10, the score of this configuration is 6017.

In the Fire Strike test of 3D Mark, the score is 11682. Although the 1060 video card is relatively old, its current performance can still cope for a while.

Shenguang Synchronization

For those who like to play with light, ASUS's AURA SYNC divine light synchronization is a very useful thing. ASUS TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunner board mounted second generation programmable AURA connector, which can program each LED bulb and play more. In addition to the latest 5V 3PIN interface, this motherboard also has two previous generation 12V 4PIN interfaces, which can support access to more devices.

In addition to this motherboard, my memory, water cooling and chassis fan can support AURA SYNC, which can be set through Amory Crate. The motherboard and memory can be accurately identified. My water cooling and chassis fan are connected to the same 5V 3PIN interface by using a splitter, so they are only identified as one device. However, when setting the lights, they are effective on both devices.

In the software, many kinds of lighting effects are prefabricated, including constant brightness, breathing, flickering, color circulation, rainbow, starry night, music, intelligence and other effects. The playing methods are very diverse. At the same time, each LED lamp can be programmed separately to form its own unique effect.

The following are all kinds of magic light synchronization effects of motherboard, water-cooling and fan. Because the graphics card does not support magic light synchronization and is not RGB light effect, it cannot be added. Shenguang synchronization can make all hardware with RGB light effect in the chassis change synchronously and integrate into one, which is really a good function. Of course, Shenguang Synchronization can not only support the hardware in the chassis, but also some keyboards and mice can support Shenguang Synchronization, and can also join it.

At the same time, it can also set the lighting effect after each game is started, so that each game can have a unique light, and each game can have a different experience.

BIOS and Application

I have used ASUS BIOS for a long time, and the interface is relatively friendly. In order to facilitate user use, the current BIOS has become a graphical interface, and supports Chinese display. In the simple setting interface, you can meet the basic needs of general users, and set the startup sequence, memory XMP, fan regulation, and several system preset configurations. All of our common functions are here. I don't use advanced interfaces in my daily use.

In BIOS, opening the two options of "ASUS Performance Enhancement" and "Performance Mode" can break the TDP limit. Otherwise, the power consumption of non K processors will be limited to 65W, and that of K processors cannot exceed 125W. This allows the processor to play a more powerful performance.

At the same time, the CPU core voltage, memory voltage and memory controller voltage can also be set in the BIOS advanced mode. It is worth mentioning that the CPU voltage can be set manually, which is a very practical function for players.

ASUS allows its Intel 400 series motherboard to also support the Smart Access Memory function of AMD 6000 series graphics card, which allows the CPU to fully access the data in the video memory, faster and direct communication, and further improve the performance. Even the B460 chip can improve the performance of the RDNA2 graphics card in some games.

FAN Xpert 4 can set different schemes for the fan speed of the chassis, so that we can have a quiet environment for light use; In heavy use, it has good heat dissipation performance.

summary

Asustek TUF GAMING B460M-PRO heavy gunners have retained the TUF GAMING espionage series, which has always focused on durability and solid work. With TUF LANGUARD network security protection, TUF inductance, TUF capacitor, and TUF transistor, they provide stronger durability. In addition, there are 2.5Gbps network card, Type-C interface, dual M.2 interface, 10 phase digital power supply The technologies of SGS Sync and the second generation programmable light with pins and other leading products of the same level are really the trumpets of ASUS in the products of the same level. This motherboard enables the B460 chip to use Intel's processors with K stably, which enables many people to buy back processors with K, but only in order to meet users who are not overcrowded and reduce the installation budget.