Wednesday, January 10th 2024

ASRock at CES 2024: New Phantom Gaming Monitors, Recent Motherboard and VGAs

ASRock brought a selection of its recently launched gaming monitors, motherboards, and graphics cards, to the 2024 International CES. The company had recently refreshed its Intel 700-series chipset motherboard family to align with 14th Gen Core desktop family launch, and we see boards such as the Phantom Gaming Z790 NOVA, a full-featured ATX motherboard positioned just a notch below the Z790 Taichi series; and the the Z790I and B760I PG Lightning WiFi Mini-ITX boards. Toward the end of 2023, AMD had launched its Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series, with two distinct platforms in play—HEDT and workstation. We got a close look at the WRX90 EVO, a gargantuan board that wires out nearly all 128 PCIe Gen 5 lanes of the Threadripper; along with 8-channel DDR5 memory. Notice the two large VRM heatsinks that are actively cooled by 40 mm fans. Even after giving each of the PCIe Gen 5 slots full x16 wiring, the platform has enough to spare on some NVMe slots.
The Socket AM5 B650 Steel Legend is almost white in color not because the PCB's soldermask layer is white—it's still black—but has been extensively printed upon using the same machine that prints all the connector and SMD labels. There's not much to report in the graphics card front except we caught a few newly launched Radeon RX 7600 XT 16 GB graphics cards, which we'll get to review in the coming weeks; and that even the most affordable ASRock Challenger OC card has two 8-pin PCIe power connectors to support the 190 W total board power of the RX 7600 XT. Both AMD and its partners are banking on the LLM and generative AI acceleration boost that having 16 GB of video memory gives a mid-range GPU like the RX 7600 XT. It's only marginally faster than the RX 7600 at gaming, as per AMD's own performance claims.
Among the Phantom Gaming monitors we spotted are the PGO27QFW2A, a 27-inch planar OLED monitor with 1440p resolution, a snappy 360 Hz refresh rate, and 0.03 ms (GTG) response time, from the OLED panel. This is one of the new monitors that actually needs the kind of bandwidth DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0 provide, to achieve 1440p @ 360 Hz. The PG32QRT2A is a 31.5-inch 1800R curved VA monitor that does 1440p at 180 Hz, with an impressive 400 nits brightness, and an integrated Wi-Fi antenna, a feature that helped one of its siblings almost win our Best of 2023 recommendation. The PG27QFW2A is another interesting monitor, a 27-inch flatscreen that uses a Fast IPS panel, giving you 1440p at a blazing 400 Hz. It relies on not just DisplayPort 1.4, but also the latest HDMI 2.1. Other features include DisplayHDR 600.
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