ASRock X299E-ITX/ac mini-ITX Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

The ASRock X299E-ITX AC X-series X299 Motherboard is available now for a wallet-busting £379.99. That’s not cheap, not by a freaking long shot. However, for the sheer level of features on offer, you would expect to pay a premium. However, you would also expect such a unique design to also carry a premium, and then another premium for cramming it all into mini-ITX. That’s not before you also expect this tiny motherboard to be capable of housing a few thousand pounds/dollars of flagship hardware; maybe the motherboard would still end up being the cheapest component anyway.

Overview

This motherboard is built for an extremely specific part of the PC building market. It’s priced well out of the reach of your day-to-day consumer for one. Furthermore, it’s also not really built to be a gaming motherboard, although it’s certainly more than capable. It’s not built for the most extreme performance either. However, what it does offer it offers in huge amounts. Connectivity on this motherboard is extreme in every sense, with more SATA ports, USB headers, fan headers, networking connections, than any other mini-ITX motherboard I’ve ever seen. What makes this so crazy is that they’ve done it on the smaller motherboard with the massive X299 socket eating up so much room.

Big Features Little Package

ASRock really knocked it out of the park when it came to ergonomics. No space is wasted on this motherboard, and that’s really something to behold. The two riser cards on there providing M.2 mounts, additional SATA and USB 3.0 headers save a huge amount of space. However, they didn’t even hinder the mounting of a massive Noctua NH-D15S. Furthermore, there’s still room for four SODIMM slots, allowing up to 64 GB of DDR4 memory in quad-channel up to and beyond 4000_ MHz (OC). That’s three M.2 drives, including any Optane drives you install. 6 x SATA 6 Gb/s drives such as super fast SSDs, and a total of eight USB 3.1 Gen 1 and Gen 2 connections. Storage is really not a problem here.

Networking and Audio

With Dual Intel Gigabit LAN, you can bridge your connections or have a backup. Of course, this is also handy for all kinds of workstation setups too. Furthermore, with 2T2R Dual Band 802.11 ac WiFi and BT 4.2, you’re not short of wireless options either. In the spirit of picking fantastic chipsets for all the parts of the motherboard, it also features the award-winning ALC 1220 Audio Codec from Realtek, delivering 7.1 Ch sound and hi-res audio.

Should I Buy One?

This motherboard is clearly not for everyone. If you answer yes to the next few questions, then it’s the motherboard for you. Are you building an extremely hardware dense workstation around X299? Does it have to pack loads of hardware and still fit into an extremely compact and portable mini-ITX form factor? And are you willing to spend thousands to take full advantage of all the features on this board? Then go nuts! It’s an incredible bit of engineering, and for those needing that compact and powerful system, it’s the best option out there right now.