ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3

Well-known in recent times for its impressive mini-ITX motherboard, the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 includes a very solid feature set. The ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 joins a small handful of small form factor X570 models at launch but looks to stand-out from the crowd with a major feature; a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connector on the rear panel.

Following in line with the rest of its premium X570 product stack, ASRock has equipped the board with a hefty looking 10-phase power delivery, and official support for DDR4-4533 memory across two available slots with a total capacity of up to 64 GB. A single full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 slot is located at the bottom of the board, with a single PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, and just four SATA ports. The networking is handled by an Intel Gigabit LAN port, while the Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax wireless interface is controlled by the Killer AX1650 interface with support for BT 5 devices.

On the rear panel alongside the single Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connector which is the highlight of the board, the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 also includes two USB 3.1 G2 Type-A and two USB 3.1 G1 Type-A ports. This is contradictive on the official specifications that were given to us at Computex which stated this model has two USB 3.1 G2 Type-A ports on the rear, as well as two USB 2.0 ports which also seem to be missing from the rear panel. On the display model at Computex, there is a clear CMOS button, a DisplayPort input and HDMI video output, with a PS/2 combo port, and five 3.5 mm color coded audio jacks with a S/PDIF optical output due to the use of a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec.

The ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 mini-ITX motherboard looks to stand out from other brands mini-ITX offerings with the Thunderbolt 3 which has been a mainstay of its desktop-focused small form factor models of recent times. A solid looking 10-phase power delivery similar to that of the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac model we reviewed makes this even more appealing to users looking to push out the overclocks on the new Ryzen 3000 series processors. The X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 has an MSRP of $300, which is by no means cheap in comparison to its other mini-ITX models of late.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 ASRock X570 Steel Legend
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  • isthisavailable - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    The industry needs to make up its mind when it comes to USB C. Laptops are launching with only USB C and meanwhile $700 motherboards only have 1 USB C port and 8+ "outdated" USB A's
  • The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    It's almost like there's a huge amount of peripherals with USB-A connectors that people who use PCs expect to continue to work when they upgrade! Isn't backwards compatibility a funny feature?

    Meanwhile, the only peripherals that laptops generally use are docks, hubs, and storage devices - all of which have USB-C versions out the wazoo.
  • naris - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    Why are memory speeds and channels show & discussed when talking about chipsets when the memory controllers are in the CPUs? Memory controllers have not been in chipsets for many years now!
  • halfflat - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    ECC support can be hard to verify for mere mortals; collating (or even better, verifiying) ECC capability on these motherboards would be an extremely useful addition to the article.
  • ishkatar - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    Does any of the boards support Raid 5? I only see 0, 1 and 10.
  • Zibi - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    You don't want to use RAID 5 without proper RAID Controller with cache.
    That means dedicated card.
    Actually from performance / security perspective RAID 10 is pretty OK.
  • The_Assimilator - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    AMD dropped RAID-5 support upon introduction of the AM4 socket (remember, chipset functionality like RAID is now a CPU function). I don't have an issue with that, since -5 is a very uncommon use-case in consumer workloads and if you want to do -5 right, you really want a hardware RAID card with a BBU.

    But -5 is pretty much dead anyway due to ever-increasing drive sizes - the rebuild time on anything over 1TB is horrendous, what you really want in such a scenario is RAID-6, and no consumer motherboard every has or will support that.

    And please don't tell me you're using RAID-5 for data integrity, because invisible corruption is a thing that I have experienced personally. If you want *actual* data integrity, use Windows Storage Spaces or RAID-10, and as a last resort RAID-6.
  • Arbie - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    There must be something you left out of this roundup. Whatever it was, please go back and put it in, and next time get it right. Thanks.
  • Korguz - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    huh ????
  • Gastec - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    That $700 must be an error right, perhaps of judgement?

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