B760 vs Z790 - Intel Raptor Lake Deep Dive

How does the Z790 stack up against the B760 and are the top end boards worth the price? I deep dive into the chipset connectivity to see what you get for your money with Raptor Lake and Intel 13th Gen with MSI Tomahawk, Edge and Godlike boards used as examples.

Amazon Affiliate Links to the boards looked at in this round up:

0:00 Intro
0:55 Chipset Architectures and PCIe Lane allocation
2:20 Product Segmentation for MSI Motherboards
4:00 Tomahawk B760 Wifi board layout and PCIe lanes
5:48 Tomahawk Z790 Wifi board layout and PCIe lanes
8:05 MPG Edge Z790 Wifi board layout and PCIe Lanes
9:20 MEG Z790 Godlike board layout and PCIe Lanes
12:30 Conclusions

[jerryminus]

Very informative, descriptive - lanes allocation of course - and knowledgeable. Thank you.

[dotamaze]

One of the best videos that explains the current Intel platform differences!

[netiturtle]

Very useful, wish the video was out few months ago. Would have saved me many hours.
Showing what device is connected to CPU and what to chipset, I couldn't always even find on my own

[nokiaairtel]

Man you are a life saver, keep doing this

[bhavyamalik]

The video we need…ty bro…b760 really makes sense for day to day gamer, save mowny on board and probably get better cpu and gpu then

[GoWstingray]

Well explained, one thing that did get me on the B760 which might be worth mentioning, is setting up Raid on NVME drives is not supported, so moving my raid array from my old Z590 board was a no go, which pee'd me off a bit as it wasn't even really mention in the spec, and you had to dig in the manual and even then it was ambiguous. I've got a Asus B760-Plus WiFi cheap used with a 13600k, I wasn't bothered to much about overclocking as with all my previous boards since the Z68 and 2600k I've never ended up bothering. My sons 13600k is very slightly faster in Z690 board but nothing worth worrying about, I was more wondering what i was missing in terms pcie lanes but again for what I'm using it for not much. In my opinion over clocking is pretty much dead, not like the days of my 2600k where you can actually make a massive difference, cpus are pretty much pushed to the limits out tye box these days.

[kiranks]

just caught up to this one! thanks again for the deep dive. The DMI was the reason why I preferred Z790 board instead of B760.
1. Just one question here. what about PCI lanes for IO connectivity. In the amd architecture, you had showed few lanes being used for IO but none here.
2. Surprising that none of the boards provide PCI5 storage for M2 slot without affecting the bandwidth of GPU slot. AMD seems to be better here. Is my understanding correct?

[chrisboylan]

Did I hear right near the end: "None of these boards can run the Gen5 NVMe SSD's"?

[JhonDoe-nyrn]

Nice guide, love diagrams of lanes you did on boards. If you are planning to review other boards in future additionally I would like to see VRM specs of boards (other reviewers such as HWunboxed fail to provide VRM specs consitently so this could be a good attraction to your video guides).

[MilaNikolov]

Thank you for the video but t would be good to add few words about MSI pro series. In my country(Bulgaria) MSI b760 tomahawk and MSI Pro Z790-A are at the same 250 euro price and edge Z790 is 350+ euro. All dd5. I don't see any benefit of b760 and edge z790 over Pro Z790-A except from an aesthetic point of view...

[mangalisoxaba]

Excellent information, thanks a lot Sir.

[wololo]

I want performance graphs! How much slower the 13900K will be on the B760

[kafka_enjoyer]

As a fully designer and gamer, I was scared a little bit to buy a b760 plus ddr 5 from Asus, cus I fear not to use the full potential of my i7 12 gen on it. Thank you mate it's now clearer to me it's Ok to go with it, cus I'm not the guy who overclock things.

My spec:
i7 12th gen K type.
RTX 4070 SUPER
Crucial ddr5 ram
Asus b760 plus mobo atx
360mm aio cooler

[mgoogyi]

I saw it in multiple reviews that heavily threaded benchmarks (for example R23) tend to get lower scores for b760 boards (for example msi tomahawk). Why is that the case?

[EYSN]

MSI MAG B760M MORTAR MAX WIFI DDR5 MSI PRO Z790-A WIFI, 4xDDR5 help me choose a motherboard. I'm leaning towards these two. I want it for the processor i7 13700kf. I will not do overclocking. If the first option can be chosen and the VRM is suitable, I would like to buy this board.

[SanketWakudkar]

Brutally honest review. Too much info, boring presentation. Cut to the chase please. Good luck though. Keep it up. I can see your efforts.❤