A look Inside

The system itself is well-built and easy to work on making the initial setup or future upgrades quite easy to do. To start you need to unscrew the four screws on the bottom that also act as feet for the system. Once removed the bottom plate pops off giving you access to the system's interior. To improve performance the unit has built in thermal pads that transfer heat from the M.2 SSD(s) and system memory, which is a nice touch. ASRock utilized the 2.5-inch drive bay assembly to function as a makeshift heatsink, a novel approach that while not fancy certainly shows they are taking into account all the various small details.


With the system open you will find the Intel AX211NGW Wi-Fi module pre-installed and ready to go, you will need to remove it if you plan to do a complete disassembly. All that needs to be done is to remove the tape on the antenna wires and remove the screw holding the module in place. At this point you can just lift it up and move it to the side.


Next remove the screws holding the mainboard to the chassis at which point it will lift out easily enough. With the system completely taken apart you can see the Core Ultra 7 155H is cooled by a rather hefty copper heatsink which is fitted with two heat pipes and actively cooled with a BSC0805HA-00 fan, which is made by Delta Electronics. A plug in CMOS battery is also located slightly under the heatsink fan should you ever need to replace it.


To get the system operational I opted to use a Western Digital SN770 1 TB NVMe SSD and a 32 GB kit of Kingston Fury Impact DDR5 5600 MHz SODIMM memory.