Today, we’ll be taking a look at the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi motherboard. This tiny motherboard comes in a Mini-ITX form factor measuring just 17.0 x 17.0cm, and supports all the latest AMD Ryzen processors, including the 9000, 8000 and 7000 Series on the AM5 socket.
It features a 10+1+1 Phase Power Design and 110A SPS for VCore, on a 8-Layer PCB, which is cooled by large Aluminum Heatsinks. It comes with 2 x DDR5 DIMM slots supporting both XMP and EXPO memory modules with speeds of up to DDR5-8200+ OC.
There’s 1 x Reinforced Steel PCIE 5.0 x16 slot for next-gen GPUs, and for storage it comes with 2 x SATA ports, 1 x Blazing M.2 PCIe Gen5 slot and 1 x Hyper M.2 PCIe Gen4 slot which is located on the rear of the motherboard.
You also get a total of 13 USB ports, 2 x Lightning Gaming ports, 1 x HDMI output, 1 x Killer 2.5G LAN, a USB-C port for DP, a BIOS flashback button and WiFi 6E support. Other features include the 7.1 HD Nahimic Audio, Bluetooth 5.2, HDMI output and ASRock’s Polychrome RGB.
What’s more, the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850i Lightning Wi-Fi motherboard supports SignalRGB, which unifies your all RGB devices with advanced lighting controls, and offers greater customization and flexibility for game-reactive effects, macro automation, and system monitoring.
AMD B850 Chipset
The AMD B850 platform is the foundation for next-generation gaming and content creation experiences. Featuring enhanced overclocking capabilities, DDR5 memory support with AMD EXPO™ Technology, and PCIe® 5 connectivity for NVME storage, the AMD B850 platform is ready to power your desktop for years to come.
Here you can see the main differences between the X870E, X870 and B850 chipsets. The B850 will have a total of 36 useable PCIE lanes (up to 4 lanes for PCIE 5.0), while the higher end X870E will have a total of 44 useable PCIE lanes (up to 24 lanes for PCIE 5.0), and offers support for more higher speed USB ports. USB 4.0 support on the B850 is optional.
Why are PCIE lanes important? Well, the number of PCIE lanes in a slot or connection determines the available bandwidth for data transfer between the motherboard and the expansion card. More lanes generally mean higher data transfer rates and better performance. For the X870E and X870, there’s a total of 44 and 36 PCIE lanes repectively, while the B850 offers up to a maximum of 36 PCIE lanes.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
We’ll be testing the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850i Lightning WiFi Motherboard with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X processor, along with 48GB of V-Color Manta XFinity RGB DDR5-8000, Crucial T700 PCIE Gen5 SSD, and a GeForce RTX 4080 Super graphics card.
OK, let’s start by taking a closer look at the specifications and features in our next page.
Get the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi Mottherboard from Newegg for around USD $209 – https://tinyurl.com/mtm4emys
Or you can buy something similar – ASRock AMD B850 Pro A WiFi motherboard for around USD $190 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/4n8lw4z
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