ASRock X299E-ITX/ac mini-ITX Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

The motherboard looks staggering from the moment you take it out of the box. It’s small, but it packs in more hardware that you would typically see in this form factor. There is plenty of hardware on the board its self. However, there are two more daughter boards placed vertically to allow even more hardware to be packed into the space provided. With the Rear I/O cramming in WiFI, plenty of USB ports, High-Res audio jacks, and Dual LAN, it’s amazing just how compact things remain here.

Towards the rear, you’ll find an M.2 riser card, providing mounts for your ultra-fast storage, as well as Intel optane devices. These boards are removable too, making installation of your hardware easier, or freeing up space for other components dependant on your build.

The other riser board is even more unique. This one not only features your storage inputs but also sports extended cooling for the chipset VRM. This means better cooling for your CPU power delivery, while not compromising on the motherboards connectivity.

There are further heatsinks around the back too, which should all help with power delivery when it comes to overclocking the motherboard. We know our CPU can hit 4.6Ghz, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can do that on this motherboard.

There are four SODIMM slots on this motherboard, rather than DIMM slots. This does mean you’ll have to buy the more compact DDR4 memory format, but with four slots, you can pack a huge amount of memory in here. Many mini-ITX board favour two DIMM slots, so this is a big step up, and keeps in theme with the extreme nature of the board.

The other two SODIMM slots are located near the PCIe slot. Again, the slot is armoured, so dealing with the weight of a bulky GPU isn’t going to be an issue here.