For years Hypertext has been reviewing notebooks, smartphones, peripherals and other accessories. While we’ve dabbled in PC component reviews we’ve traditionally held back for one reason – consistency.

To give you a better idea of how the sausage is made, generally we’ve been falling back on our personal hardware when it comes to reviewing components, but this makes comparing components tough as our personal setups are constantly changing.

Over the last year we have been working with Gigabyte South Africa to build a test bench and while we’re waiting for a few more components to be delivered, we now have half of the equipment we need. Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting the components we will be using as our baseline.

These will culminate in a final review and benchmark of the system once we have all of our components.

The first component we will be showcasing is our motherboard.

The mobo here is the Gigabyte B660 Gaming X DDR4 which features an LGA 1700 socket and the Intel B660 Express chipset.

This motherboard supports 12th Gen Intel Core processors and while we aren’t using the DDR5 iteration, we’re also in South Africa during a component shortage so we opted for something where additional parts are more easily accessible.

Thankfully we do have support for PCIe 4.0 on one PCIe slot while the other two slots support PCIe 3.0. We also have two M.2 connectors supporting PCIe 4.0 x 4 while the third supports PCIe 3.0 x 4.

As for connectors on the board this is what is available:

• 1 x 24-pin ATX main power connector.
• 1 x 8-pin ATX 12V power connector.
• 1 x CPU fan header.
• 1 x water cooling CPU fan header.
• 3 x system fan headers.
• 1 x system fan/water cooling pump header.
• 2 x addressable LED strip headers.
• 2 x RGB LED strip headers.
• 3 x M.2 Socket 3 connectors.
• 4 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors.
• 1 x front panel header.
• 1 x front panel audio header.
• 1 x USB Type-C header, with USB 3.2 Gen 2 support.
• 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 header.
• 2 x USB 2.0/1.1 headers.
• 1 x Trusted Platform Module header (For the GC-TPM2.0 SPI/GC-TPM2.0 SPI 2.0 module only).
• 1 x serial port header.
• 1 x Q-Flash Plus button.
• 1 x reset button.

All told, this motherboard offers support for a wide variety of memory timings while also sporting support for Windows 11. The support for 12th Gen Intel processors should also help keep this motherboard relevant for at least the next 12 months.

You can find the full specification breakdown here.

Once again, we have to give a massive thank you to Gigabyte South Africa for helping us bring local hardware reviews that are relevant.

Be sure to check back next week as we will be taking a closer look at the chassis and power supply unit Gigabyte South Africa has provided with thanks to Cooler Master.