Asrock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX/ax
Asrock, ITX and B550 are made for each other, but at a price.
As the name suggests, the Asrock B550 Phantom Gaming ITX/ax is a mini-ITX motherboard, the sole such entry in our roundup. The mini-ITX form factor has a loyal following and B550 ITX boards should sell well as they are suited to the lower power characteristics of the Ryzen platform.
Being a mini-ITX board, you’ll always have a lack of PCB real estate to fit heaps of extras in, but surprisingly the little Asrock competes well against the bigger boards. You still get dual M.2 slots, though only the primary slot is equipped with a heatsink. The other slot is on the back side of the board. Asrock managed to include the premium ALC1220 audio codec, though surprisingly there’s no optical output on the rear panel. The little Asrock also includes addressable RGB, four SATA ports and a welcome USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C case header.
The Asrock PG ITX doesn’t have the strongest VRM you’ll ever come across, but it’s still an 8-phase design with 90a stages powered by an 8-pin power connector. It will run any CPU you care to throw at it, but its relatively small heatsink will need good airflow if it’s not to get too hot if you push it hard.
The rear I/O is fairly standard and comes with the shield preinstalled. We’d like to see more than six USB ports as three or four can often be taken up straight away by the likes of a keyboard, mouse, printer or external HDD. Six USB could imply some sort of PCB limitation as other premium B550 ITX boards are limited to six too. We’re happy to see Intel i225V 2.5 GbE really penetrating the lower end of the market along with Wi-Fi 6. We like to see both DP 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 ports for use with the upcoming Zen 2 APUs.
We’ve always been fans of Asrock’s modern UEFI interface. The B550 PG ITX isn’t massively loaded with options, but all the core ones you care about are easily accessible. Don’t forget to give AMD’s ECO mode a try sometime if your CPU or VRM temps get a bit high over summer.
The little Asrock was a bit of a mixed bag in our testing, though as always the differences are small enough to not be a concern. It isn’t particularly fast at multicore rendering and encoding type work with our 3700X but it did excel with our SSD bandwidth testing and was the fastest in all AS-SSD tests. Well done. Gaming performance too was competitive with the other boards in the roundup.
The Asrock PG ITX has a RRP of $399 which puts it at the high end of the B550 market. At this price it’s going up against the premium ATX boards, and it costs more than competing ITX boards from Asus and Gigabyte. Asrock’s reputation for excellent value has deserted it in this case. Early pricing aside, it’s actually a very well appointed ITX board and with its advertised Ryzen 4000 series support, we could see it being the last AM4 ITX board you’d ever buy. Let’s just hope the pricing matures and it becomes a better bang for buck option. Asrock’s ITX prowess is on full display here, but its current pricing hurts it in a competitive market.
“It will run any CPU you care to throw at it, but its relatively small heatsink will need good airflow if it’s not to get too hot if you push it hard.”