Board Layout

ASRock has in the past made the mistake of only having one M.2 port on their Mini-ITX boards, but thankfully here it offers two and has placed them on either side of the PCB, which will be a familiar setup to anyone that's built a small PC since M.2 ports have been around. However, while the top slot is PCIe Gen 5 compatible, the heatsink is tiny. The board itself is attractive, but lacks any onboard RGB lighting and has the minimal amount of features. There are no onboard buttons or displays. The rear of the PCB features a large heatsink for the underside of the VRMs, so ASRock has at least spent money in the right places.


A surprising addition is that of a 2-pin thermistor header with a probe included in the box. These are handy for tying additional temperature inputs to fan headers or even using a coolant probe to control radiator fans in a custom watercooling loop. We appreciate the effort, but it's maybe not the right caliber of motherboard, being highly value-conscious, plus in a small case, the temperature variation is much smaller than a large one. There are three fan headers in total, which is typical of most Mini-ITX motherboards, with one being nestled between the top M.2 port and Wi-Fi module, and there's 3 A/36 W to share between them.

Thankfully two of the three fan headers and both 3-pin ARGB headers are located at the top of the PCB so should offer simple cable tidying and access, unless your motherboard ends up inverted in a sandwich-style Mini-ITX case close to the case base, in which case you'll definitely want to connect your cables before you install it. Another way to cut costs is to dip to USB 3.0 for the Type-C front panel header, which has happened here so you're limited to 5 Gbps speeds, there's no enhanced power delivery either. This isn't a massive problem unless you were hoping to fast-charge your smartphone or use an external NVMe SSD.


Getting back to the M.2 heatsink we can safely say that there's no way this will be able to handle any kind of sustained workload on a current PCIe Gen 5 SSD. It's too small and also lacks underside thermal pads, but should be fine for a PCIe Gen 4 SSD unless you use a third party heatsink, which don't cost too much so it's not a completely lost cause if you do want the ability to drop in a PCIe Gen 5 SSD at some point. The heatsink and SSD lack any kind of tool-free features so you'll need your screwdriver handy. Thankfully it was pretty easy to install.

Speaking of tool-free features, the board is completely devoid of them, which does make sense if you're keeping costs to a minimum as it all adds up and serves only to make your life a little easier while making your wallet a little lighter. So it's back to the usual PCIe socket latch that is thankfully easy to get to due to the small chipset heatsink under the M.2 port.


If you concerned about being able to reset the BIOS (there isn't a button on the rear I/O panel or on the PCB) then the clear CMOS header is located right at the front of the PCIe Gen 5 x16 slot. This does mean your graphics card partially obstructs it and in the tight confines of a Mini-ITX case, you'll likely have to remove the card to get at it. The rear M.2 slot doesn't really pose any issues other than potentially being tricky to get at depending on the size of the CPU area cut out in the motherboard tray and these underside ports do allow for slim heatsinks to be used if you're worried about thermals. This slot is PCIe Gen 4, but you can run both M.2 slots without any PCIe lane stealing given there are plenty of lanes to go around.


The top M.2 SSD sits very close to the PCIe x16 slot, but there's still plenty of clearance to be able to get the SSD out with the graphics card installed, even if it has a large backplate. With your graphics card and M.2 heatsink installed, accessing the third fan header and audio header could be tricky, so you'll likely want to connect these cables first.


The I/O panel is about as basic as they get with just one port offering more than 5 Gbps and only four being faster than USB 2.0. Still, the seven total Type-A ports is likely more than enough for the average user. There's also a USB BIOS Flashback button here too, which is important given there's likely another generation or two of processors to come on Socket AM5 for potential future owners. There are actually two video outputs here as the Type-C port can switch to DisplayPort mode, but if you want three displays you'll need a discrete graphics card. The I/O shield is flexible too and can move to adjust to slight differences in the I/O hole placement, which is probably useful to deal with those late night purchases on Chinese websites selling cheap Mini-ITX cases.