Mighty Mini-ITX: ASRock Announces X299-ITX/ac
Mighty Mini-ITX: ASRock Announces X299-ITX/ac
ASRock has announced one of the industry’s first Mini-ITX motherboards for Intel’s latest Core X processors in the LGA2066 packaging. The new X299E-ITX/ac is small, but it takes full advantage of Intel’s new X299 platform, offering support for all CPUs with up to 18 cores, quad-channel DDR4 memory on the higher-end CPUs, three PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 slots as well as everything that one might expect from a Mini-ITX board, including Wi-Fi.
Besides being a miniature motherboard for Intel Core Extreme processors, the most important aspect of the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac is support for quad-channel memory in this form-factor. The company’s previous-gen
Intel X99-based Mini-ITX mainboard was feature-packed, but one of the things it missed was the quad-channel memory sub-system, which had an expected negative effect on performance in applications that require high memory bandwidth.
By contrast, the new unit has four SO-DIMM DDR4 memory slots and even supports DDR4 overclocking (assuming that there are SO-DIMMs that can be significantly overclocked). In fact, putting the Socket R along with a sophisticated VRM to support Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X CPUs with TDP of up to 165W as well as four memory slots onto a small motherboard is a rather remarkable engineering achievement. Meanwhile, very tightly packed design of the X299E-ITX/ac may impose certain limitations on compatibility with large cooling systems.
Just like every other Mini-ITX motherboard around, the ASRock X299E-ITX/ac has only one PCIe 3.0 x16 slot for graphics cards. In the meantime, the X299E-ITX/ac is the first miniature mainboard to feature three M.2 slots (PCIe 3.0 x4 or SATA) for SSDs. In addition, the board carries six SATA 6 Gbps headers for builds that require multiple storage devices in drive form-factor.
As for connectivity, the X299E-ITX/ac comes with a 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.2 module (based on an Intel controller), two GbE ports (Intel controllers too), two USB 3.1 headers (Type-A and Type-C), six USB 3.0 connectors, 7.1-channel audio sub-system (enabled by the Realtek ALC1220 controller) and so on.
Siinäpä olisi kunnon mini-atkn sydän.