Closer Look
The X570 Phantom Gaming TB3/ITX motherboard arrived in a retail package which is as always well described. Inside the box, we will find the motherboard, user’s manual, drivers and software DVD, SATA data cables, WiFi antenna, and M.2 screw. Pretty much all we need for installation.
The same as in previously reviewed ASRock X570 Extreme4 motherboard, the I/O shield is installed on the motherboard. The integrated I/O shield offers some adjustments in case if we needed to move it 1-2mm any side.
The motherboard looks really interesting. The PCB is black with shiny red elements. Some users may like it, some not but for sure it fits gaming theme, and after all this is a product designed for gamers.
The used chipset supports 2000 and 3000 Ryzen processors. We have to remember that 1000 series Ryzen won’t run on the X570 motherboards.
On the chipset, we will find a large heatsink with a heat pipe which is going to the back and is connected to the I/O ports cover. The I/O ports cover in the same time is a heatsink made of metal alloy. It’s a smart idea to balance with limited space and still keep proper cooling of the components.
The fan used on the chipset is making some noise when it’s at full speed, but we can set lower speed or keep automatic adjustment, and then it will be quiet.
The only thing which isn’t as great as I thought at first is a cooler mounting so holes for the cooler in Intel standard. Seems excellent as long as you have or are planning to purchase one of the coolers on a quite short compatibility list. Unfortunately, only one out of six new coolers that I had could be installed, and it was the smallest tower cooler – Noctua D9L. Recently reviewed Scythe, SilentiumPC or higher Noctua series coolers couldn’t fit because of too tall VRM and chipset heatsinks.
The X570 PG TB3/ITX motherboard supports only one M.2 PCIe 4.0 socket. At first, I was a bit disappointed, but if we compare it to other motherboards, then two high-speed M.2 drives would cause additional heat which would be hard to handle. So yes, the competition offers two M.2 sockets on their mini-ITX size motherboards but at the cost of fan noise and depends on a used drive also thermal throttling.
The X570 PG TB3/ITX supports the latest communication and storage controllers like WiFi in AX standard, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.2, or PCIe 4.0 devices. It’s something you won’t find on Intel-based motherboards yet, so it seems like an ASRock X570 motherboards are a future-proof investment.
The motherboard’s LED illumination includes addressable RGB connector and a line of RGB LEDs installed on the back of the motherboard.
ASRock delivers easy to use Polychrome RGB software which is fully compatible with various devices from leading PC hardware manufacturers. What more may we need?
