Colorful CVN B560M Gaming Frozen Motherboard Review
White PCB motherboards are extremely rare these days, but the CVN B560M Gaming Frozen manages to deliver for those on a budget.
The Bottom Line
Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing
There are six iterations of Intel's 500 series chipset on the market. Most of the motherboards we cover are the top-end Z590 platform but recently, we had the opportunity to check out a B560 platform from Colorful.
Colorful has been around since the mid-90s and, in the last 15 years, has become the largest GPU vendor in China. More recently, they have expanded their product offerings to include motherboards, memory, SSD, and even full systems.
The B560M Gaming Frozen is a Micro-ATX platform built on the B560 chipset; this means we have the availability of memory overclocking but no CPU overclocking. These boards support 10th and 11th Gen CPUs alongside DDR4 2133MHz through 3200MHz memory support across four slots.
Storage is deployed over six SATA 6Gbps ports and two M.2 slots. One of which includes support for Gen4 NVMe, the other SATA, and Gen3. Additional connectivity is pushed over USB 3.2 with a total of six ports available, and Networking includes 2.5Gbe and WiFi6.
Pricing
The CVN B560M Gaming Frozen carries an MSRP of $179.99 with a one-year warranty.
Packaging, Accessories, and Overview
Packaging and Accessories
The packaging carries an all-white theme, chipset, and CPU support listed along the bottom.
On the back, we have a full board diagram with features listed below.
Included with the board, we have a Wi-Fi antenna, SATA cables, and reading materials.
CVN B560M Overview
The CVN B560M carries the rare white PCB, certainly fit for themed builds with aluminum heat sinks to offer a secondary color option. This is an mATX platform with two full-size PCIe x16 slots, two m.2 ports, and support for four DIMMs.
The rear of the board is empty, all-white PCB with no doublers used in the power design.
Rear I/O includes USB 2.0 and PS/2 ports at the top that move down into DP and HDMI outputs. We then run into USB 3.2 Gen2 and then a set of Gen 1 ports and RJ45 LAN.
Running around the outside of this board, we have a full range of headers along the bottom; these include USB, audio, and fans.
Further down, we have another set of fan and RGB headers.
Around the corner, we have six SATA ports followed by the internal USB 3.2 header.
Up the side of the board, we have the 24 pin power connection and RGB header at the corner.
Fan headers take up the right edge of the top shared with the memory slots.
Last, we have the eight-pin power connection.
PCB and Circuit Analysis
Power design includes twelve power stages, 10+2 arrangement. They are made by Alpha and Omega.
Bottom right, we have the chipset.
Bottom left, we have the audio setup.
UEFI, Software and Test System
UEFI
Colorful has a well-laid-out EFI. It offers an EZ Mode that includes system information and temperatures across the top, options for configuring XMP in the middle, and boot priority at the bottom.
Advanced mode includes options for configuring chipset and boot settings. Advanced options ruin across onboard devices, power management, and storage.
Motherboard Software
CVN B560M Frozen includes software for controlling and monitoring CPU, memory, and fans.
RGB control is the second option and includes support for DRAM modules along with the board.
Further control will allow you to address each RGB header with preset profiles.
Last, we have monitoring with a histogram.
Motherboard Testing Supporters
Sabrent supports our storage testing with the Rocket 4 Plus.
Thermaltake has come onboard with their Toughram XG for all Intel motherboard reviews.
TweakTown Intel Motherboard Test System
- CPU: Intel Core i7 11700K
- GPU: ASUS TUF RTX 3080 10GB
- RAM: Thermaltake Toughram XG 2x8G DDR4 4000 (buy from Amazon)
- OS Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 1TB (buy from Amazon)
- Power Supply: Corsair RM1000X (buy from Amazon)
- OS: Microsoft Windows 10 (buy from Amazon)
Cinebench, Realbench and AIDA64
Cinebench, Realbench, and AIDA64
Cinebench R23
Cinebench is a long-standing render benchmark that has been heavily relied upon by both Intel and AMD to showcase their newest platforms during unveils. The benchmark has two tests, a single-core workload that will utilize one thread or 1T. There is also a multi-threaded test that uses all threads or nT of a tested CPU.
The CVN B560M offered single thread performance at 1521, on average about 50 points lower than Z590 platforms. With multi-thread, we see a score of 14300; this is around 600 points lower than Z590 on average.
Realbench
Realbench uses both video and photo workloads to benchmark your CPU. We use all three workloads in this scenario.
Realbench has the B560 on par with the Z590 platforms tested with a time of 34.9 seconds.
AIDA64 Memory
Memory bandwidth reached 55K for both reads and write, while copy was just under 51K.
Memory Latency came in at 66.1 seconds.
AIDA64 offers 163K for AES.
With SHA3 we see 5329.
PCMark10 and PugetSystems Benchmarks
PCMark 10
PCMark is a benchmark from UL and tests various workload types to represent typical workloads for a PC. Everything from video conferencing, image import, and editing, along with 3D rendering, are tested.
PCMark testing gave us a score of 7962 overall.
Application testing showed an overall score of 12311.
PugetBench
PugetBench comes from the fantastic people over at Puget Systems that have done countless hours and years benchmarking hardware. For our testing, we will utilize their Davinci Resolve, Photoshop, and Lightroom benchmarks, you can look into them more here.
Puget for Photoshop ended with a score of 930.
Davinci Resolve gave us a score of 1112.
Microsoft Flight Simulator
Pushing into our gaming test, we see 63.7 FPS from the B560.
System I/O Benchmarks
Storage with CrystalDiskMark
Storage tests are all handled by our Sabrent Rocket Plus NVMe 4.0 SSD. Secondary storage tests are conducted with our WD_Black P50 SSD.
Storage testing showed 7015 MB/s reads, and 5335 MB/s write.
Q1 Random showed 73 MB/s reads, and 284 MB/s write.
USB 3.2 Testing showed 1063 MB/s for Gen 2 and 474 MB/s for Gen 1.
Audio - Dynamic Range
Testing audio, we set up RMAA with a 3.5mm cable from the line-in to speaker out (green to blue) and set both to 24Bit 192KHz. The B560M offered 96.1dBa.
Networking
Networking has us testing both 1Gbe and Wi-Fi 6 on this platform. The B560 offered 949.8 for LAN and 1203.4 for WiFi6.
Power, Thermals and Final Thoughts
Power Consumption
We used R23 and watched our power draw; idle showed 124 watts while full load gave us 412 watts.
Thermals
Temperatures landed at 22c idle and 65c peak.
Final Thoughts
The biggest thing Colorful has going for it with the B560M Frozen Gaming is the PCB being white. The board does have a decent feature set and would like to be a solid platform for a budget gaming build, likely with a non-K CPU; perhaps the 11400 would be best. It does offer a decent set of memory overclocking tools and is equipped with Gen4 PCIe; however, limited just as much as Z590.
Colorful does have pretty decent BIOS in place that offers a good amount of basic board options. These allow you to configure the onboard devices like USBN, Wi-Fi, and LAN functionality along with dedicated storage sections for SATA and NVMe.
Overall a solid board for a budget-minded gamer or even someone wanting to build a themed PC on mATX. With its MSRP at $180, it has a decent enough feature set, although it lacks 2.5Gbe capability.
What We Like
Design Fantastic white colored PCB.
Compatibility 10th and 11th Gen CPU support.
Price MSRP at $180.
What Could Be Better
Connectivity Few USB ports and no support for Gen2x2.
Performance | 85% |
Quality | 75% |
Features | 70% |
Value | 85% |
Overall | 79% |
The Bottom Line
The CVN B560M Gaming Frozen is an adequate board for any gamer wanting to build on a budget.
CVN B560 Gaming Frozen Motherboard
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* Prices last scanned on 12/31/1969 at 6:00 pm CST - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission. |
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