ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard Review

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard Overview

Taking a first look at the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 we can see it has the same black, red, and silver design that we’ve seen previously from Phantom Gaming products from ASRock. The I/O over looks quite nice and has the Phantom Gaming logo on it. The PCB of the board is black, although the board is pretty much covered with components so it is hard to really see any of the PCB.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

Starting at the CPU socket we of course have AMD’s AM4 socket. AMD X570 motherboards will support both 2nd and 3rd generation AMD Ryzen processors. One interesting thing about ASRock’s implementation of the AM4 socket is that they have removed the AM4 mounting brackets to make more room on the board since it is very limited. Instead you have Intel mounting holes, which will allow you to install Intel-based coolers on the board. We will get into that a little later in our review. Surrounding the CPU socket are your power delivery components. ASRock is using a 10 phase power design in a 8 + 2 configuration. The power delivery components are covered by two large heatsinks which are quite tall.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

Hiding towards the top-left edge of the board is your 8-pin EPS connector. On the opposite edge you’ll see a few headers, these include a standard 4-pin RGB header, CPU fan header, and optional CPU fan header.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

On the far edge of the board you’ll find two DDR4 DIMM slots. This board will support DDR4 memory up to 4533 MHz. These slots are not metal reinforced, but do not have locks on the bottom, which will make swapping out your memory much easier once you have a graphics card installed. Also along the edge of the board you’ll find a 3-pin addressable RGB header, 24-pin ATX power connection, USB 3.1 header, and four SATA 6GB/s ports. The SATA ports are of course at a 90-degree angle.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

Coming to the bottom of the board one thing really stands out and that is the chipset heatsink / fan. It is quite large and may interfere with some CPU coolers. Right next to it are a few more headers which include your front panel headers, speaker header, a USB 2.0 header, TPM header, and another 4-pin fan header.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

On the bottom edge of the board you of course have your PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot. It is metal reinforced and ready to support heavy graphics cards. Also right by the slot is your HD audio header.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

Moving over to the rear I/O, we can see that we have a nice integrated I/O shield which has the Phantom Gaming logo on it. As far as connections and buttons go you have a combination PS/2 port, two USB 3.2 gen 1 ports, WiFi antenna connections, a clear CMOS button, DisplayPort, HDMI, a Thunderbolt 3 / USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-C port, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-A ports, and your audio connections. I really like that there is a clear CMOS button on the rear I/O, it would be quite hard to access once you have your hardware installed in a small mini-ITX case if it was on the board itself.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

Flipping the board over to the back we find a PCI-Express 4.0 M.2 slot. There is no integrated heatsink, which is a bit of a bummer as many Gen4 M.2 drives have massive heatsinks, which might not even work is some cases.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Motherboard

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