ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3

Well-known in recent times for its impressive mini-ITX motherboard, the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 includes a very solid feature set. The ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 joins a small handful of small form factor X570 models at launch but looks to stand-out from the crowd with a major feature; a Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connector on the rear panel.

Following in line with the rest of its premium X570 product stack, ASRock has equipped the board with a hefty looking 10-phase power delivery, and official support for DDR4-4533 memory across two available slots with a total capacity of up to 64 GB. A single full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 slot is located at the bottom of the board, with a single PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot, and just four SATA ports. The networking is handled by an Intel Gigabit LAN port, while the Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax wireless interface is controlled by the Killer AX1650 interface with support for BT 5 devices.

On the rear panel alongside the single Thunderbolt 3 Type-C connector which is the highlight of the board, the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 also includes two USB 3.1 G2 Type-A and two USB 3.1 G1 Type-A ports. This is contradictive on the official specifications that were given to us at Computex which stated this model has two USB 3.1 G2 Type-A ports on the rear, as well as two USB 2.0 ports which also seem to be missing from the rear panel. On the display model at Computex, there is a clear CMOS button, a DisplayPort input and HDMI video output, with a PS/2 combo port, and five 3.5 mm color coded audio jacks with a S/PDIF optical output due to the use of a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec.

The ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 mini-ITX motherboard looks to stand out from other brands mini-ITX offerings with the Thunderbolt 3 which has been a mainstay of its desktop-focused small form factor models of recent times. A solid looking 10-phase power delivery similar to that of the ASRock Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac model we reviewed makes this even more appealing to users looking to push out the overclocks on the new Ryzen 3000 series processors. The X570 Phantom Gaming-ITX TB3 has an MSRP of $300, which is by no means cheap in comparison to its other mini-ITX models of late.

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 ASRock X570 Steel Legend
Comments Locked

225 Comments

View All Comments

  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    Pretty much this. Modern games on DX12 won't see any benefit unless the game developer bakes in support (which they appear uninterested in doing for cost reasons) and older games run very well on a single modern GPU. AMD and NV are hardly acknowledging SLI these days either and nowhere but at the top end so there is even less compulsion for developers to bother with supporting it. All in all, you're better off not worrying about SLI unless the industry changes direction significantly in the next few years.
  • ajlueke - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    The real question however, is does all this power delivery actually have any practical benefits? If I drop a 3000 series CPU in an X570 board vs X470, can I achieve any additional performance? And what is the power consumption differences in the respective chipsets? That is the type of info I would like to see.
  • PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    It's a marketng differentiator only as motherboard manufacturers all use the same core components and are quick to emulate one another with similar features. Through branding and obscure features that do not significantly impact computer operation, they search for something they can offer that may encourage you to make a purchase in a very, very crowded field of offerings.
  • lopri - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    Solid power delivery for high-performance CPUs is perhaps the farthest thing from obscure marketing features. OEMs do play with marketing BS for differentiation, but the underlying power delivery system is extremely important and can impact everyday operation for these multi-core CPUs.
  • PeachNCream - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    At long as it meets AMD specifications, no it won't. If it doesn't meet specifications, then it's a bad design. There's no reason to tout being mediocre or a hair or two above mediocre unless you're running out of unique bullet points for the backside of the box that nobody bothers to read anyway.
  • Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    Stock performance will be the same across the board unless the manufacturer royally screwed up and the power delivery has to throttle due to temperatures (which there are some cases of with super cheap motherboards and 8 cores). Doing OC (and PBO is already OC) is where things start to change. More / better phases means less heat output and better voltages (ripple). This can potentially give you better clocks. But most of this is only useful when you start OCing on water or sub zero systems. Air cooled overclocking will hardly benefit at all. And regarding power consumption you can go into a lot of detail. Sometimes more power phases simply destroys efficiency, when they are all fired up all the time. Sometimes more power phases are smartly managed and load balanced to be kept at their optimal efficiency. It really depends on the implementation.
  • Peter2k - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    If you leave everything at stock, then there is no real reason to upgrade
    Most people would think keeping the socket backwards compatible as an upside

    In a desktop the only real reason why we think about power draw going up from 5w to 11w is because manufactures like to keep the cooling block small, and those need a fan
    Chipset fans bring back memories out of terrible noisy days
    Also I remember chipset coolers to be a bit bigger in the past, I'm sure if you're just trying to provide food cooling, without trying to hit that gamer look, then you can cool that chipset without active fan

    If you want to try your hand at OC'ing you should probably want the better power delivery

    And there is no telling if the older boards will also run fine with higher memory speeds
    Guessing they would, at least until the magical 3600, that's not that outlandish high
    And how much that affects performance this time around still has to be tested

    Short story
    You have a Ryzen already, just make it a drop in replacement
    No need to throw out the board
  • Peter2k - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link

    Any one that would argue about the electricity costs going up (I've encountered those) should also not that all that shiny bling probably draws more watts then the 6w or so difference between last gen and this gen
  • pavag - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    I expected benchmarks.
  • sorten - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link

    You expected benchmarks on 35+ boards that were released two days ago, and many of which aren't even available at retail?

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now