Finished Looks

OK ASRock, you clearly told me which DIMM slots are which here, but could I have another little arrow or something telling me which slots to use first? Thanks. It doesn't truly matter which slots you use first (I did try A1/B1 and A2/B2 as those might be the most common configurations). When you first apply power to the board, it's going to power cycle quite a few times while it reads all the devices plugged into it and gets its PCIE arrangement and such figured out. I made sure to Fill both M.2 slots with NVME drives, and added a PCIe-based Wi-Fi card into the mix along with my GTX 1080 GAMING GPU to fill out the slots and see how this affordable board handles it all.


The large heatsinks that dominate the socket tend to disappear once you get the system all populated with bits and bobs, and there's decent room for memory clearance along with airflow over the top of your installed VGA and the upper M.2 port, too.


You can see my PCIE-Wi-Fi card in the first picture above, a decent distance from the installed VGA so as to not impede airflow, and the lower M.2 slot is low enough to be out from under that hot VGA as well, making this slot configuration quite nice for single-VGA users who might add in other PCIe devices, such as a sound card or Wi-Fi like I did.