Verdict and Conclusion
Back in the day, we used to place our precious PCs on our desks so that we can admire it everyday. It may be good to look at, but it would take so much valuable desk space. Over time, as our demands grew for more desk space, our beloved PC would sadly one day, be placed on the floor, which isn’t really ideal to be honest. As a PC enthusiast, we need to revert back to good old days, and place our beloved PC back to where it belongs … on our desk!
One of the ways to do this, is to build more compact PCs using mini-ITX motherboards and chassis. This will allow gamers, streamers and content creators to finally place their PCs on their desk, while giving them more desk space, for accssories such mics (with a mic arm), camera setups, control decks, large mouse mats and headset/headphone stands etc.
With that said, the demand for Mini-ITX systems are on the rise because of this, and that is why manufacturers such as ASRock, Asus, Gigabyte and MSI will always have at least one mini-ITX motheboard in their catalogue.
OK enough talk, let’s get back to the review and find out how well the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi Motherboard performed in our tests.
Using the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X, along with 48GB of DDR5-8000 ram and a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, we managed to get some pretty impressive scores in all of our benchmarks, including a Cinebench 2024 score of 2,251 points for multi core, and 129 points for single core. For PCMark 10 and PassMark 11, we got very good scores of 10,321 and 17,343 respectively.
For Procyon Video Editing Benchmark, we got a score of 57,479 and a score of 226 for the AI Computer Vision Benchmark. For 3DMark Steel Nomad and Speedway, we got excellent scores of 6,819 and 7,596 respectively. And finally, for Port Royal and Timespy, we got an amazng score of 18,728 and 26,241 respectively.
This motherboard maybe tiny in size, but it comes with plenty of features, including a 10+1+1 Phase Power Design and 110A SPS for VCore, on a 8-Layer PCB, which is cooled by large Aluminum Heatsinks.
As with most Mini-ITX motherboards, it only comes with 2 x DDR5 DIMM slots, but it does supports both Intel XMP and AMD EXPO memory modules, with speeds of up to DDR5-8200+ (OC). So no complaints here.
Expansion is limited due to its size with only 1 x PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for next-gen graphic cards, but you do get plenty of storage options. These include 2 x SATA ports, 1 x Blazing M.2 (PCIe Gen5x4) and 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4) slot on the back of the motherboard.
I was surprised with the amount of connectivity this tiny motherboard has to offer. It has 13 x USB ports (both Type-C and Type-A), 1 x 2.5G LAN, Wi-Fi 6E support and Bluetooth 5.2. Other features include the 7.1 HD Nahimic Audio, HDMI output, BIOS Flashback button, ASRock’s Polychrome RGB and support for SignalRGB.
I get asked all the time, whether it’s better to get an AMD X870/X870E or a B850 motherboard. Well, like I said before… if you don’t need all those PCIE lanes (as found on the X870/X870E), then a B850 motherboard will do just fine. And since the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi is a mini-ITX motherboard, it doesn’t physically have those extra PCIE lanes anyway, yet it performs just as well in our tests.
Get the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi Motherboard 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
Final Words:
If you love Mini-ITX motherboards like me, and you want to build a mini PC powered by a Ryzen 9000 series processor, then the ASRock Phantom Gaming B850I Lightning WiFi motherboard is your answer. It’s packed with features and offers good performance, plus you can get it at an extremely affordable price too.
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