ASRock X300TM-ITX
There are only a few modern motherboards of the Thin Mini-ITX format. The latest among them is the ASRock X300TM-ITX. It is in its essence very simple and does not even have its own chipset. The equipment of the board is thus more modest, but it will be one of the cheapest options for AMD APU. Support is across all classes, from Athlon Raven Ridge to the highest performance Renoir (Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G).
The new ASRock X300TM-ITX motherboard has been released. It is designed for smaller computers that require half the height of the I/O shield. In this case, it is only 2.5 cm (1″) high, as on other Thin Mini-ITX boards. The area dimensions of the PCB are otherwise common with traditional Mini-ITX format motherboards, i.e. 170 × 170 mm.
The ASRock X300TM-ITX is a bit strange in that its design does not include a southbridge, but this board does not even work with it. Only the integrated northbridge (SoC) in Athlon and Ryzen processors is used for operation.
All models with Raven Ridge, Picasso and Renoir core models are supported, including the 65-watt ones. The 5-phase power phase design of the board is quite decent and also uses a 4-pin additional power supply. However, the use of processors without iGPU is not considered. First, they all have a higher TDP than supported, and most importantly, the board does not have a PCI Express ×16 expansion slot, so you will not connect a graphics card to it.
It also differs from most standard Mini-ITX boards by using smaller SO-DIMM memory slots. There are two and officially support dual channel 64 GB DDR4-2933 (Raven Ridge and Picasso) and DDR4-3200 (Renoir), respectively.
The RJ-45 network connector (Realtek RTL8111GR) as well as the external USB ports are run from separate controllers. All four USB connectors on the rear panel are of the 3.2 gen 1 standard (i.e. with 5 Gb bandwidth), while one of them can be optionally type C. You can run four extra USB connectors (this time only of the 2.0 standard) onto the PC case from the internal headers.
There are also two M.2 slots among the internal connectors. One for the WiFi/BT module (not included) and the other for SSD with full PCIe 3.0 ×4 support. You can also connect one traditional 2.5″ SATA storage to the board.
It is also worth mentioning that the board has up to three video connectors. One of them is internal LVDS, which is mainly used to connect LCD displays in laptops. This may be a more suitable option for pre-built computer systems than an external connection, but will only display 1920 × 1080 px at 60 Hz. Only the two external HDMI 2.1 connectors will allow higher resolution. A serial COM port is also included.
When and for what price the X300TM-ITX will be sold was not revealed by ASRock in the press release. But since this is not an announcement but a release and it’s already listed on the ASRock website, the availability in stores can be expected any day.
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