A Closer Look
The Mortar is a great looking motherboard, and features a dark PCB design, with mostly black hardware. Overall, it’s got a fairly stealthy look, and short of a few tiny red highlights on the motherboard, it should blend in with virtually any colour scheme easily enough.
The top PCIe slot is reinforced, allowing it to more easily support the weight of modern graphics cards. This is a dual GPU capable motherboard though, so I would have liked to see the second full-size PCIe slot armoured too, but it’s hardly a deal breaker. Tucked into the middle, you’ll find an M.2 mount, perfect for super fast storage.
Connectivity is reasonable, with four SATA ports, pretty much enough for most mATX builds. There are two USB 3.0 headers, and a good number of USB 2.0 headers, so hooking up the rest of your hardware should be easy enough.
Four DIMM slots, nothing too crazy, but they support 3200MHz+ (OC) DDR4 memory.
The power delivery for the CPU is a single 8-pin header. This runs through some pretty competent VRM/chokes, identical to those found on this motherboards bigger brother.
Of course, there’s also a good size heatsink on the CPU power hardware, and its low profile design shouldn’t impede CPU cooler mounting.
Connectivity around the back is pretty amazing. There are five full-size USB ports, as well as a single Type-C. However, with HDMI, DP, and DVI, you’ll have zero worries about hooking up a monitor. Finally, we also have PS2, and RJ45 LAN ports, as well as five gold-plated audio jacks and Optical out.
