Maxsun Puts the PCIe x16 Slot on the Back of its Latest B760 Mini-ITX Motherboard

[TheLostSwede]

We've seen a lot of motherboards with the power, SATA and USB connectors on the rear at Computex this year, but Chinese Maxsun decided to put the PCIe x16 slot on the back of its Mini-ITX MS-Terminator B760BKB D5 motherboard. This might seem like a crazy move, but with the right chassis, this means that the graphics card won't need a PCIe extension cable, while fitting in a compact chassis. It's also become increasingly hard to retain signal integrity over ribbon cables and with PCIe 5.0, it might be impossible. Another added benefit of this design is that the board also has a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot available for something like a 10 Gbps network card or just about anything else you'd want to plug into a compact PC.

The overall board specs don't really stick out from the crowd, as the Intel B760 chips is a somewhat limiting factor as well. In addition to the PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and the PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, the board also has a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe slots—one on each side of the PCB—and a slim SAS connector using an SFF-8654 connector. In addition to this, the board also has two DDR5 DIMM slots, four SATA ports, a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port, a DP 1.2, an HDMI 2.0 port, a USB Type-C port of unknown speed and WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2. The power design consists of a fairly basic 8+1+1 phase setup. We'd like to see this board design to become a standard, as it makes a lot of sense for the SFF market to allow for a better placement of the PCI x16 slot to allow for a more compact chassis without having to compromise on the choice of graphics card.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Chrispy_]

It's a cool idea and I welcome any change from ATX which is becoming increasingly dated in both slot layout and size-efficiency, but the number of cases this immediate fits is close to zero right now, as most of the sandwich designs are designed primarily around ribbon cables with more space between the board and the GPU.

 

[LabRat 891]

That's pretty much how I envisioned an ITX-derived modular 'mobile' form factor would be laid-out. Neat.
At the least, expect some interesting builds to pop up in social media/tech news in the following months...

 

[TheLostSwede]

It's a cool idea and I welcome any change from ATX which is becoming increasingly dated in both slot layout and size-efficiency, but the number of cases this immediate fits is close to zero right now, as most of the sandwich designs are designed primarily around ribbon cables with more space between the board and the GPU.

Yeah, they were showing some, but unfortunately it was a bit crowded at their booth, so we couldn't get pics of it.
There are a couple of pics over at Tom's. That's obviously just one orientation possible.

Maxsun's new mini-ITX motherboard puts the GPU slot on its backside

A strange motherboard layout could be ideal for SFF PCs.

www.tomshardware.com

 

[hsew]

Eventually they’re gonna move everything to the back of the motherboard!

 

[PixelTech]

I like this arrangement of this motherboard. Should be the new form factor of ITX motherboards. And then all we need is some CPU style coolers for GPUs. Then we can have an efficient cooling system of cool air from bottom straight up through the case to the top.