Introduction

ASRock has been in the Mini-ITX game for a while now, and we still have fond memories of its crazy X99 and X299 boards, where it was the only manufacturer to go HEDT for enthusiast boards on 170 mm x 170 mm PCBs. Thankfully, it's continued to offer wide support for the form factor across both premium and mainstream chipsets, and today we have the AMD B850 option in the form of the Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning Wi-Fi, which also has a Z890 equivalent.

We've seen some slightly eye watering prices from Mini-ITX motherboards recently, which is why those that use B-series chipsets remain by far the most popular. At just over $200 the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning Wi-Fi is well-priced for a current generation chipset board that supports overclocking, but it's also pretty clear that it isn't equipped with a lot of the extras we saw on the ASRock X870E Taichi for example. Seeing as it's going to be buried in the depths of a small case, aesthetics and the like perhaps don't matter as much, but we'll be looking at what else ASRock has cut in terms of specifications to offer a B850 motherboard for such a reasonable price, from the outset Wi-Fi 7 has been ditched for Wi-Fi 6E. Also, it will be going up against our 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X as well as a PCIe Gen 5 SSD to see if it can handle a high-end system.



Looking at the competition in the Mini-ITX space, MSI is entirely absent from the AMD 800-series while both ASUS and Gigabyte's B850 offerings are considerably more expensive. There are alternatives if you consider the B650 or B650E chipsets, though, with this board's predecessor saving you $10-20, but the Gigabyte B650I AX is another option for a little more than $200. However, it's extremely basic with just five vCore power phases and doesn't even have an M.2 heatsink. The only other option would be either spending around $100 more for the popular ASUS ROG Strix B650-I Gaming Wi-Fi, or Gigabyte's triple M.2 slot B650I Aorus Ultra, or their respective B850 options. So it would seem ASRock has this price bracket mostly to itself.

Specifications