Board Layout

With a board this small, and a socket this big, it is only natural that everything seems to all be crammed together. Even the back of the board has a fair bit of stuff on it.


The socket itself is closely guarded by SO-DIMM slots, the VRM and the board's rear I/O panel. That VRM is a 7-phase design; each phase is capable of 60A.


The four SO-DIMM slots that flank either side of the socket support up to 4000 MHz memory, but you'll have a hard time finding 4000 MHz SO-DIMMs. All four slots are aligned in the same orientation, even though they sit on either side of the socket. This board's maximum memory capacity is 64 GB.


The rear of the board carries dual M.2 ports, one on either side of the board's backplate. These ports only support PCIe-based M.2 devices of the 2280 variety. Most high-performance NVME drives are of this form factor right now, so the singular size is not a big deal right at this moment, but that could change in the future.


For PCIe expansion, you are provided with a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. Given the form factor, this is standard-fare. The rear I/O has antenna ports, USB 3.1 Gen1 and Gen2 ports, audio, and dual LAN ports. There is also a single button that can be used as either a power or Clear CMOS button. A switch is provided to swap what this button does, and that switch is just above the PCIe slot, next to the chipset cooler. That means it is accessible even after you have the board installed and all filled up.


Due to the small form factor, adding in all this functionality isn't exactly possible within the confines of the main PCB. To fix that, ASRock has two additional PCBs that connect to the board via different sockets. One sits on the front of the board, and the other is on the rear, next to the rear I/O ports. The PCB at the front uses a specialized socket and carries the SATA ports, a USB 2.0 header, and a USB 3.0 header.


The rear card is quite different. It fits into a special SO-DIMM slot and carries the LAN chips and a USB hub. If you decide you don't want this mini-board, you'll disable the LAN ports and the USB 3.1 Gen1 ports on the rear I/O panel. The add-in card also carries the main M.2 slot (supports M Key type 2230/2242/2260/2280), which supports both PCIe and SATA devices. Having these options is kind of nice for those who want to minimize how many system components there are since you can simply pull the cards from the board and have that added space for perhaps a cooler, or whatever else you may like.