ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 Motherboard Overview
The ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 is your typical mini-ITX motherboard and it basically has an all black design with a few red accents. Almost all of the board is covered and I always find it impressive how much they are able to fit on these small boards.
At the center of the board is the CPU socket, which is Intel’s LGA 1200 socket. Z590 motherboards support Intel’s 10th and 11th generation Core processors. Surrounding the CPU socket we have our power delivery components. ASRock is using a 10 phase (8+2) VRM design that makes use of 90A Intersil ISL99390 power stages for the Vcore and 60A Intersil ISL99360 power stages for the SOC. These are covered by two large heatsinks, which are connected by a heatpipe.
Towards the top corner of the board you’ll find your 8-pin EPS connector. Moving over there is a 3-pin addressable RGB header as well as three 4-pin fan headers.
As we come over to the edge of the board we find our two DDR4 memory slots which support up to 64GB of 4266 MHz memory. The slots do not have locks on the bottom which makes swapping out your memory once you have your graphics card installed easier. Also on the edge of the board you’ll find your 24-pin ATX power connection, front panel headers, a 4-pin standard RGB header, USB 3.2 gen 2 header, three SATA 6GB/s ports, and a USB 3.2 gen 2×2 header. Typically we see four SATA ports on mini-ITX boards so seeing only three was a bit of a disappointment. Also the location of the third port will make it harder to access once you have all of your hardware installed.
Moving to the bottom of the board, most of it is covered by a large heatsink which is for the M.2 slot. Below that is your single PCI-Express x16 slot, which is metal reinforced. As a reminder if you are using an 11th generation processor both of these slots will operate at PCI-Express 4.0.
Removing the two screws on the M.2 heatsink we can see that it does have thermal tape on it and that there is a bottom half of it for even better cooling.
The rear I/O of the board has a nice cover over it, which really brings the whole board together. There is also an integrated I/O shield with Phantom Gaming styling. As far as ports go from left to right we have HDMI, DisplayPort, five USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-A ports, 2.5G Ethernet, Thunderbolt 4 (Type-C), a small clear CMOS button, WiFi antennas, and your audio connections.
The back of the board features metal reinforcement, which help with cooling as well as stability of the board. There is also a second M.2 slot, which is PCI-Express 3.0.
