Did ASRock Just Put X99 On A Mini-ITX Board? Oh Yes It Did!

[N.Broekhuijsen]

ASRock has gone mad -- it has built a Mini-ITX motherboard based on the X99 platform (and secretly we love it).

Did ASRock Just Put X99 On A Mini-ITX Board? Oh Yes It Did! : Read more

 

[maestro0428]

Finally! 8 Cores in an itx.

 

[dstarr3]

Hooray for doing cool things like this, but I have to admit, I don't really see the point. Because if you're building a small-but-powerful gaming rig, a Haswell-E doesn't really get you much better gaming performance than a regular i5 or i7. And you only get two memory slots, so the benefit of quad-channel 64GB RAM is lost. So you're really kind of wasting your money on such a high-end processor there. But if you're building a workstation, you definitely want more than two memory slots, and you probably want at least two or three PCIe slots for expansion cards. So... why does this exist?

 

[raschmidt1]

I see an M.2 slot, or rather I see the place where you would screw one down, so their must be an M.2. On the Z77's and Z97's the mSATA/M.2 is on the back, but on my A88X ITX the Wifi/mSATA slot is in the same place as this one. This board looks easily as crowded as an FM2 ITX but sticking a 6 core or 8 core Intel processor on here sounds like fun. Shame on the cooler but I think most people who really need an 8 core CPU aren't gamers and aren't quite as interested in overclocking.

 

[grmnlxndr]

no quad-channel ! ! ? ?

 

[xkche]

Why don´t use any "mini-board" outside the motherboard to add features?.
Focus the principal on the Motherboard and any other things in a secondary board, like the VRM on the Asus Impact.

 

[InvalidError]

no quad-channel ! ! ? ?

The ITX form format is a little tight on surface area for that. It is already surprising enough that they put standard-size DIMMs instead of SODIMMs.

Not sure what sort of public ASRock is going after here, but the enthusiast who wants every possible X99/i7-58xx/59xx feature exposed clearly is not it.

 

[futureyes]

You can see the M.2 mounting points above the PCIe x16 and behind the Audio/Lower USB 3.

 

[mosc]

would have preferred the smaller DIM'S and quad channel. It's not really X99 without quad channel and if it's not, what's the point?

Though for most people considering X99, a power supply crammed into an ITX case isn't going to meet their graphics needs.

 

[Osmin]

It would be nice if they had a case designed for it with sealed liquid cooling for both processor and graphics card. Without heat issues, you could overclock the expensive processor and graphics card to make this an interesting choice for a custom box. I like the USB 3.1 support and the M.2 slot. Faster DDR4 memory in quad channel would only marginally improve overall speed.

 

[Blueberries]

I guess I just don't see the point in an x99 chipset on a board with 2 ram DIMMS and one expansion slot. In what mockery would you use this? Intel HD Graphics benchmarking?

 

[giantbucket]

the whole point of X99 / LGA2011 is dual processors, 40 PCIe lanes, and 8 DIMMS. the first two are impossible on ITX, so what's the point of the board in the first place?

cool, but dumb.

 

[BadBoyGreek]

the whole point of X99 / LGA2011 is dual processors, 40 PCIe lanes, and 8 DIMMS. the first two are impossible on ITX, so what's the point of the board in the first place?

cool, but dumb.

My thoughts exactly. I'm sure there's still a market for those who want 6 and 8 core performance in a small package, but all the other benefits of the X99 platform are otherwise lost.

 

[warmon6]

Except X99 chipset only supports 1 processor last i checked.

The socket lga 2011/2011-3 can be in dual/quad configuration but not with the x99 chipset. That requires one of the server chipset.

Although I do see the point your making on the PCI-e lanes and dimm's.

Although this kind of motherboard, I could possibly see where you may need the power of 8 cores in a small that doesn't requires those features you mentioned.

Maybe video transcoding, folding@home/bitcoin (well not likely but...) / or other cpu task that doesn't require powerful video or large amount of memory.

 

[InvalidError]

I guess I just don't see the point in an x99 chipset on a board with 2 ram DIMMS and one expansion slot. In what mockery would you use this? Intel HD Graphics benchmarking?

LGA2011 CPUs do not have IGP, so no HD Graphics benchmark.

It mostly makes sense for people who want to brag about having an LGA2011v3 CPU in an ITX box and do not care about most of the things they have to sacrifice to get there. If they use mostly compute-intensive software, the DRAM slots won't really be missed either.

 

[raschmidt1]

I don't get why people think this is dumb?

ROG IMPACT: $230-$240
i7 4790k: $280 (at Microcenter)

The other Asrock X99 boards are around $200-$250, I don't think its unrealistic that this would be too.
i7 5820k: $300 (at Microcenter)

Chances are this will be the same price as a high end 1150 ITX board, so you trade your overclocking for a couple extra cores, plus the opportunity to upgrade to even more cores down the road. This is NOT a bad idea. Just because it doesn't have all of the X99 features doesn't make it dumb - alot of buyers wouldn't have used them anyways.

 

[hobbsmeerkat]

This would make for a really interesting ITX build tho the biggest issue will be getting cooling to fit the slim socket, tho i assume we might see adapters at some point possibly from Corsair and EK, or even whole board cooling like we've seen from Bitspower in the past.
Another issue is that i believe DDR4 only comes in 4-packs, so unless you're planning on building 2 mobile workstations from the same boards youre kinda stuck with an extra pair until Skylake hits the market next year.

But i think running this in a tiny ITX case like EK's new prototype case that a few sponsored builders have gotten, and pair it with a 5960x or 16-core Xeon with a Titan X or Maxwell-based Quadro would make a stellar Mobile workstation, even if it lacks expandability or quad channel memory...

 

[TechyInAZ]

Now that's cool!!! I've always wondered when this would happen and even had a few ideas for making such a extreme mobo like this.

Here is one:

1. Use 4 laptop dims instead of 2 desktop dims to take advantage of quad channel...

 

[maestro0428]

Quad channel is useless if you ask me.

 

[Rhinofart]

I would so use this in one of my WC builds. I'm an enthusiast, and custom PC builder. I would so use one of these motherboards in a showcase build. Nice, compact, powerful, gives me plenty of space to route stuff around, better rads, fancy rads, etc. I'm all over this like a fat kid on smarties.

 

[bzwaagstra]

I'm the perfect customer for this board and will look at it seriously. I don't need some fancy game oriented rig as I all work and no play. I need fast rock solid multi-core CPU so that means no overclocking, a reasonable about of RAM (32Gig MORE than enough) and just about any graphics will do. Why? Photo and video editing. Wait, video editing with the limited storage available on this board. Yes, as only my current project is local. Everything else is on server or cloud. So super fast 4xM2 is perfect as I don't have to screw with arrays. This is the perfect compute intensive mini-workstation.

 

[nullsteph]

Hooray for doing cool things like this, but I have to admit, I don't really see the point. Because if you're building a small-but-powerful gaming rig, a Haswell-E doesn't really get you much better gaming performance than a regular i5 or i7. And you only get two memory slots, so the benefit of quad-channel 64GB RAM is lost. So you're really kind of wasting your money on such a high-end processor there. But if you're building a workstation, you definitely want more than two memory slots, and you probably want at least two or three PCIe slots for expansion cards. So... why does this exist?

I wan't the fastest machine I can get for web dev. I don't care about gaming or even graphics, just running many apps and avoiding any lag.

 

[nullsteph]

Yes, finally! About frikin time!
The cooling may be an issue, but I will definetly give this board a thorough try.
My interests are programming, so I just need the fastest CPU available, in a small space.

 

[Robert Ostrowski]

Shuttle did this with x79 a few years ago. It came already installed in a shuttle case, but take the board out, it was mini itx. But this is great, sometimes you just want more cores.

 

[PEJUman]

call me dreaming, but if asrock managed to squeeze 2x flat dimm slots and 1 or 2 ultra M.2s on the backside, I will sell my kidney to buy this and a 5820k.