Radxa is a Chinese manufacturer of various Arm based devices and something of a minor competitor to the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The company has just launched its latest product which is called the ROCK 5 ITX. As the name implies, it's a Mini-ITX form factor motherboard, which in itself is rather unusual for Arm based hardware to start with. However, Radxa has designed the ROCK 5 ITX to be a NAS motherboard and this is the first time we've come across such a product, as most Arm based boards are either intended for hobby projects, software development or routers. This makes the ROCK 5 ITX quite unique, at least based on its form factor, as it'll be compatible with standard Mini-ITX chassis.

The SoC on the board is a Rockchip RK3588 which sports four Cortex-A76 cores at up to 2.4 GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz. This is not exactly cutting edge, but should be plenty fast enough for a SATA drive based NAS. The board offers four SATA 6 Gbps connectors via an ASMedia ASM1164 controller, each with an individual power connector next to it. However, Radxa seems to have chosen to use fan-header type power connectors, which means it'll be hard to get replacement power cables. The board also has a PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slot for an NVMe drive. The OS boots from eMMC and Radxa supports its own Roobi OS which is Debian Linux based.Other features include a PCIe 2.0 M.2 slot for WiFi modules, a microSD card slot, a PoE module header, an eDP interface and MIPI DSI and CSI interfaces for displays and cameras. More NAS focused features include a pair of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet ports and four USB 3.0 ports, as well as a pair of USB 2.0 ports. There's also a USB Type-C port that supports USB 3.0 data speeds, but also DP Alt Mode display output, alongside two HDMI ports, of which one supports 8K60p output. There's even a 4K60p HDMI input, but it's unclear how this will function. Finally there's a pair of 3.5 mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF output and a 12 V DC power jack. The board can be powered by a standard ATX power supply or an external power brick.

The RK3588 SoC also houses an Arm Mali G610MC4 GPU and a 6 TOPs NPU for machine learning acceleration. Radxa offers the ROCK 5 ITX in four different configurations with 4 to 32 GB of LPDDR5 RAM. Pricing for the 4 GB SKU wasn't available, but the 8 GB SKU starts at US$120, with the 16 GB SKU coming in at US$160 and finally the 32 GB SKU at US$240. All SKUs appear to come with 8 GB of eMMC for the OS.