ASRock reveals their Z390 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac motherboard

ASRock has officially unveiled their entire Phantom Gaming range of motherboards, and right now, we thought that we would have a closer look at their MITX variant, the Z390 Phantom Gaming ITX/ac. 

When compared to ASRock’s previous LGA 1151 ITX board, we can see that the company has put a lot of effort into their VRM cooling solution, creating a lot of surface area for heat dissipation while adding a heat pipe to conduct heat towards a secondary heatsink. Hopefully, this design will be enough for 8-core overclocking, with ASRock touting support for both 8th Generation and 9th Generation Intel Core processors. 

This is where we see a little strangeness in the design of the Phantom Gaming-ITX/ac, as the secondary heatsink below the CPU socket sits on top of an M.2 slot, allowing the heatsink to act as both a secondary heatsink for the motherboard’s VRM and as an M.2 heatsink. This is a very strange design decision from ASRock, as surely you don’t want heat from your VRMs being dumped on an M.2 slot? I guess we will see how well this works in practice as this board is seeded out to reviewers. 

Other features of this motherboard are its inclusion of Intel Thunderbolt 3, which is also compliant with USB Type-C storage devices and displays, Intel Gb LAN (not 2.5Gb LAN), two SATA/NVMe M.2 slots, Intel Wireless 802.11ac and four USB 3.1 Gen 2 connections on the rear I/O. ASRock’s Phantom Gaming motherboards will also support the company’s Polychrome SYNC RGB technology, with both RGB and Addressable RGB headers.