Computex: ASRock goes all in on X299, smaller form factors and Bitcoin mining

ASRock had one of the busier booths at Computex this year, with a ton of new HEDT motherboards on show, on top of a focus on small form factor systems and even Bitcoin mining.

Obviously with the launch of X299, there were a lot of motherboards on show at ASRock's booth, which you can see in the gallery above. There are many different gaming-oriented boards, along with the return of the Taichi board, an OC board and a Mini-ITX. The Taichi board is particularly interesting with triple M.2 slots that support RAID, and 13 total power phases and a 12-phase design for the CPU.

The OC board has fewer M.2 ports but comes with extra 4-pin CPU power to benefit heavy overclockers. There is also additional power for PCIe near the 24-pin connector. Beyond that, the PCIe slot layout appears to be friendly for quad-GPU setups, which could make this a good pick for benchmarks.

Finally, the X299 Mini-ITX board uses a full size LGA 2066 socket, rather than a narrow version like the previous generation X99E-ITX motherboard. It carries room for quad-channel SODIMM memory with support for speeds of up to 3200MHz. So far, this is the only mini-ITX X299 motherboard around for the HEDT market.

In the gallery above you will also notice some X399 versions of the ‘Pro Gaming' and ‘Taichi' motherboards. These are largely the same as their Intel X299 counterparts but the Taichi does lack 10GbE. The Pro Gaming board also carries an additional four pin CPU power as Threadripper is expected to use up to 200W when overclocked.

ASRock is also helping lead the charge on X370 Mini-ITX boards for AMD's new Ryzen processors. So if any of you are looking to build an ITX AMD-based system, there are more options coming our way this year.

ASRock also showed a new Mini-STX system at Computex. This is big news as it supports the Intel Core i7-7700K in such a small form factor. There is dual channel memory support with speeds up to 3200MHz. There are also slots for three M.2 SSDs and M.2 WiFi, alongside 5Gbps Type-C USB and a laptop-style SATA connection. There is no Thunderbolt support at this time but we may possibly see a version with it in the future. There is an MXM slot for installing a graphics card, the system we saw on display used a GTX 1080.

This Z270 Mini-STX board makes for a perfect pairing with the ASRock DeskMini, which is a tiny powerhouse featuring a GTX 1080. The case has around a 2 litre capacity. We checked the GTX 1080 temperatures with the system running TimeSpy and saw a maximum temperature of 76 degrees celsius, so it should be able to handle gaming no problem.

The last note for ASRock's booth is Bitcoin mining. There are a few new boards on the way focussing purely on mining crypto-currency, which appears to be making a bit of a comeback at the moment.

KitGuru Says: The ASRock booth was very busy this year, which was good to see. Is there anything here that caught your eye?

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