New Mobo for Intel i5 12600K CPU

justintime2001

justintime2001

justintime2001

Associate
Joined
3 Mar 2010
Posts
1,183
Location
Staffordshire
Could anyone advise a decent reliable Motherboard for the Intel i5 12600K CPU please? I am considering the Gigabyte B760 DS3H AX (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX at £140.

Is there a better choice for similar money or a little higher if worth it? Only for general use, multi tasking, surfing and general office apps, photo's, family video and music.
 
It is alright and fine for your intended usage, but the TUF @ OCUK that is £150 is a better spec for the extra £10.

It has another M.2 slot, 2.5 Gb LAN (from 1Gb), less USB 2.0 ports on the rear I/O, more audio jacks and SPDIF.
 
What do people think of the "MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK MAX WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard"? Lots of USB connectivity and great wifi.

I am thinking this should be ok with the i5 12600K but would also allow for future CPU updates to i7 or i9 14th gen? Is that right?
 
justintime2001 said:
What do people think of the "MSI MAG Z790 TOMAHAWK MAX WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard"? Lots of USB connectivity and great wifi.
Click to expand...
There's nothing wrong with the board, but if you spend so much on the upgrade then I'd argue the 12600K doesn't make sense anymore.

justintime2001 said:
I am thinking this should be ok with the i5 12600K but would also allow for future CPU updates to i7 or i9 14th gen? Is that right?
Click to expand...
Yeah, but any 1700 board can do that (in theory) and I wouldn't get a motherboard with the intention of upgrading to CPUs that are potentially the most likely to be broken of the 13th-14th gen.
 
Tetras said:
There's nothing wrong with the board, but if you spend so much on the upgrade then I'd argue the 12600K doesn't make sense anymore.


Yeah, but any 1700 board can do that (in theory) and I wouldn't get a motherboard with the intention of upgrading to CPUs that are potentially the most likely to be broken of the 13th-14th gen.
Click to expand...
Thanks Tetras. I'm really mot sure what to do. I like to upgrade as high as I can, even though I may not need it. I am happy to spend a bit more to get a really meaningful upgrade, if thats makes sense?
 
justintime2001 said:
Thanks Tetras. I'm really mot sure what to do. I like to upgrade as high as I can, even though I may not need it. I am happy to spend a bit more to get a really meaningful upgrade, if thats makes sense?
Click to expand...
The 12600K is what I'd consider... a generally good baseline for an upgrade. It has 6 fast P-Cores and 4 E-Cores, which are more than enough for any kind of light/medium desktop usage and decent enough for occasional heavy use. They're also good for gaming, for anything up to the level of a 4080/5080.

They're a bit more affordable than some other options, because you can get a cheap board, basic tower air cooler and DDR4 memory.

If you have more money than that, then personally I'd skip the 13th-14th gen CPUs entirely because of the potential for problems.

The next level of usage (on the Intel side) I'd go for a 265K, which is a very strong productivity CPU, but obviously that's way more expensive and needs DDR5 memory, so I would only recommend it for regular heavy usage. On the AMD side, substitute for a 9700X.

For somewhere in the middle, that's not so easy, because I consider most of those options either best for just gaming, or overpriced.
 
Tetras said:
The 12600K is what I'd consider... a generally good baseline for an upgrade. It has 6 fast P-Cores and 4 E-Cores, which are more than enough for any kind of light/medium desktop usage and decent enough for occasional heavy use. They're also good for gaming, for anything up to the level of a 4080/5080.

They're a bit more affordable than some other options, because you can get a cheap board, basic tower air cooler and DDR4 memory.

If you have more money than that, then personally I'd skip the 13th-14th gen CPUs entirely because of the potential for problems.

The next level of usage (on the Intel side) I'd go for a 265K, which is a very strong productivity CPU, but obviously that's way more expensive and needs DDR5 memory, so I would only recommend it for regular heavy usage. On the AMD side, substitute for a 9700X.

For somewhere in the middle, that's not so easy, because I consider most of those options either best for just gaming, or overpriced.
Click to expand...
Thank you, I really appreciate your help and advice. I should probably stick to the 12600K then and maybe update my old Dell monitor too. Thanks again Tetras :D
 
justintime2001 said:
Thanks Tetras. I'm really mot sure what to do. I like to upgrade as high as I can, even though I may not need it. I am happy to spend a bit more to get a really meaningful upgrade, if thats makes sense?
Click to expand...
Which board would you choose please Tetras?

Asus ROG Strix B760-F Gaming WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard at £210 or Asus TUF Gaming B760-Plus WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard? At £150. I like the idea of lots of USB ports.​

 
justintime2001 said:
Which board would you choose please Tetras?

Asus ROG Strix B760-F Gaming WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard at £210 or Asus TUF Gaming B760-Plus WIFI (LGA 1700) DDR5 ATX Motherboard? At £150. I like the idea of lots of USB ports.​

Click to expand...
~£150 is really the max I'd want to spend on a board here, for the same reason given above.

£200+ is what I'd consider high-end territory and it isn't a 'cheap' upgrade anymore, at which point I might re-evaluate the budget to see if I can get something better/different.
 
Which board would you choose please Tetras?
Tetras said:
~£150 is really the max I'd want to spend on a board here, for the same reason given above.

£200+ is what I'd consider high-end territory and it isn't a 'cheap' upgrade anymore, at which point I might re-evaluate the budget to see if I can get something better/different.
Click to expand...
I do like the choice of usb's etc on theAsus Rog Strix, if I went with this what else would you add?
 
justintime2001 said:
I do like the choice of usb's etc on theAsus Rog Strix, if I went with this what else would you add?
Click to expand...
It'd be like I said, I'd ask you what the "real" max budget is and re-evaluate the choice entirely. I know it might seem odd, but £210 on a motherboard for a 12th gen CPU (that I'd only recommend because of the price, after all) just isn't something I'd do.
 
Tetras said:
It'd be like I said, I'd ask you what the "real" max budget is and re-evaluate the choice entirely. I know it might seem odd, but £210 on a motherboard for a 12th gen CPU (that I'd only recommend because of the price, after all) just isn't something I'd do.
Click to expand...
My max budget would be £1500 without case and monitor.
 
justintime2001 said:
My max budget would be £1500 without case and monitor.
Click to expand...
This is what I'd consider a top-end build for the kind of usage you described, but on the face of it, it sounds like mega overkill:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £1,216.87 (includes delivery: £11.98)​

This is the kind of build I'd usually go for:

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £546.80 (includes delivery: £0.00)​
 
Intel Core Ultra 7 265K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail
PRO-INT-03111
£339 (incl. VAT)
£290 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Asrock Z890 LiveMixer WIFI (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard
MOT-ASR-03361
£233 (incl. VAT)
£230 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
TeamGroup Vulcan 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-51200C40 6400MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black
MEM-TMG-03146
£180 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
KIOXIA EXCERIA PRO 2TB SSD NVME M.2 2280 Solid State Drive
STO-TSH-01448
£117 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Lian Li Lancool 216 Mid-tower PC case - Black
CA-7BG-LL
£86 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Antec HCG 850 Pro Platinum 850W ATX3.1 Full modular Power Supply
POW-ATC-02745
£160 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Intel Core i5-12600K 3.70GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail
CP-69X-IN
£240 (incl. VAT)
£185 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Asus Prime B760M-A WIFI D4 (LGA 1700) DDR4 Micro-ATX Motherboard
MB-6KG-AS
£155 (incl. VAT)
£110 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
KIOXIA EXCERIA PRO 1TB SSD NVME M.2 2280 Solid State Drive
STO-TSH-01447
£69 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Antec CX600M ARGB M-ATX Mini Tower - Black
CAS-ATC-04160
£55 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Phanteks AMP GH 750W 80PLUS Gold ATX Power Supply Modular - Black
POW-PHK-02517
£85 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Thermalright Assassin Spirit 120 Evo ARGB CPU Cooler - 120mm
COO-TLR-02720
£22 (incl. VAT)
£17 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
I think I must really take your advice Tetras. I will go for the following spec and use my current case and PSU as I think they are good enough. Do you think I will see a good deal of improvement from my old spec? Thanks again for your help.

My basket at OcUK:

Total: £593.93 (includes delivery: £0.00)​
 
Intel Core i5-12600K 3.70GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail
CP-69X-IN
£240 (incl. VAT)
£185 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Crucial Pro 48GB (2x24GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C46 5600MHz Dual Channel Kit
MEM-CRU-01086
£180 (incl. VAT)
£100 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 Black Dual Tower CPU Air Cooler
COO-TLR-03280
£40 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
KIOXIA EXCERIA PRO 1TB SSD NVME M.2 2280 Solid State Drive
STO-TSH-01447
£69 (incl. VAT)
Find out more
justintime2001 said:
I think I must really take your advice Tetras. I will go for the following spec and use my current case and PSU as I think they are good enough. Do you think I will see a good deal of improvement from my old spec? Thanks again for your help.
Click to expand...
The theoretical improvement in multithreaded is very large, since you're gaining 2 performance cores (which are individually significantly faster than a 7th gen core) and 4 E-Cores, so if you do anything that uses the cores over a long run (like 10+ minutes to an hour or more), you will save a lot of time.

General responsiveness and multitasking should be improved somewhat, but noticeably? Hard to say, likely not in something like browsing, but opening and working with a large app like the Adobe suite: yes.

To be more certain, I'd really need to know exactly where the bottlenecks are right now, that are justifying the upgrade, which you can only do by running something like task manager or hwinfo (sensor tab) alongside your apps whenever there is slow performance. With desktop PCs that are only used fairly lightly, my experience is that the bottleneck is more often the hard drive (like literally, an old hard drive, not a SSD) or the RAM capacity, more often than the CPU.
 
I have tried Task Master and cannot see any bottle necks as such and I have Crucial SSD drives. The issues I have is when opening things like Outlook, Adobe or some other apps, they seem to hang for a while before opening. Not a massive issue but it does get frustrating. Also sometimes when booting up, the task bar is missing all of its icons and I have to reboot. I have cleaned off any old fiiles and clutter that I could find and ran revo uninstaller to remove any old unused files. The PC just isnt as sharp as it was and I am having trouble getting it sorted for windows 11. I need to enable secure boot & enable TPM 2.0. I have tried following Microsoft instructions but without any luck.
 
justintime2001 said:
The issues I have is when opening things like Outlook, Adobe or some other apps, they seem to hang for a while before opening. Not a massive issue but it does get frustrating.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure on that one. Is your CPU at max boost (I think is 4.5 Ghz) or the max all-core boost (4.4)? That could indicate if you have a single thread/core bottleneck, though it could also just be a software issue, bloated install, etc.

justintime2001 said:
The PC just isnt as sharp as it was and I am having trouble getting it sorted for windows 11. I need to enable secure boot & enable TPM 2.0. I have tried following Microsoft instructions but without any luck.
Click to expand...
You would likely need a later BIOS version for those options to be exposed by Asus in the BIOS.

For clarity: what kind of work do you do with Adobe? If your usage is fairly heavy in the Adobe suite, then it is possible that you would see a decent benefit from the more expensive option, or a compromise like a 245K.
 
Only use Adobe for light photographic stuff, just for fun. I am retired and just enjoy spending time on my pc to keep the old grey matter working. I put music quizes together for local pubs etc. and do a few accounting bits for local small business.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom