Much evolution of consumer PC hardware revolves around the drive to press ever more processing power into increasingly small formats. That’s exactly what Asrock’s Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 ($289.99) is designed to do for Intel’s high-end and mainstream desktop CPU platforms. Its 11th Generation Core i9 processors are powerful—and power-hungry—but this Mini-ITX motherboard was designed explicitly to leverage them. The board worked flawlessly when paired with an Intel Core i9-11900K, and it’s an excellent option if you’re looking to build a power desktop in a compact PC. Just bear in mind that with the 11900K, you’ll still have to factor in a suitable Mini-ITX case, likely with room for a water cooler.
Design: Small Rocket Lake
Like all Mini-ITX motherboards, the Z590 is roughly a square with the CPU socket in the middle. The board is predominantly black with some minor red highlights and a few RGB LEDs on the bottom. Heatsinks are set around the CPU on three out of four sides to help cool the board’s chipset and power-regulation hardware.
In total, the board has 10 DrMOS power phases that are rated to handle 90 amps each, and these are paired with an equal number of 90-amp chokes.
Asrock placed three SATA 3.0 ports and two M.2 slots on the board for storage, which is a sensible configuration for a modern Mini-ITX board. Many Mini-ITX cases can only hold two SATA storage devices, but including a third doesn’t hurt and may come in handy with cases that have extra drive mounts or even a legacy optical disc drive.
One of the M.2 slots is set under a heatsink directly below the CPU, and this slot is configured to work with PCI Express 4.0-compliant NVMe drives. This slot works only with 11th Generation CPUs, though, which means you may want to opt for a Z490 board (or at least, not count on this slot operating) instead if you’re using a 10th Generation CPU. (That may be a real scenario if you’re looking to cobble together a lower-end PC, given the complete lack of low-end Rocket Lake CPUs below the Core i5 level.) The second M.2 slot, which works with any LGA 1200-compatible CPU, relies on PCI Express 3.0 lanes to work, and this slot can be found on the back of the motherboard. Because of that access issue, you’ll want to work with that one before installing the board in a case.
A Look at the Networking and Audio
Asrock opted to use a Killer E3100G as the sole wired LAN controller on the Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4. This chip supports speeds up to 2.5Gbps, which is acceptable for a Mini-ITX board at this price range.
I would be a little more critical of this if this board were a standard ATX model. LAN controllers that support speeds of 2.5Gbps are becoming increasingly common on just about any board outside of the low end. Some competing boards around this price range have been shipping with 5Gbps NICs, but these are typically ATX boards. Mini-ITX boards typically cost more, though, which places the single 2.5Gbps LAN controller as acceptable in my book, but only barely.
For wireless networking, there’s also an Intel Killer AX1675x 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6E controller. This chip supports theoretical top speeds, at 2.4Gbps, almost as high as those of the wired controller.
There’s little of note to say about the audio solution on this motherboard. It ships with a Realtek ALC1220 audio codec, which is so heavily used by motherboard OEMs that it’s starting to seem rote or like a requirement. That is for a good reason; the Realtek ALC1220 is an excellent audio controller with solid specs, but the audio-silicon department on motherboards of late has become something of a virtually flat playing field. We don’t quantitatively test audio delivery on motherboards, but bear in mind that like with any Mini-ITX design, the implementation here may be slightly less than optimal; there’s less room to spread components out, which has the potential to cause greater noise in the audio signal. There’s also less room for noise-reducing capacitors, but again: Most Mini-ITX boards will be in the same boat. (The impact is also likely to be exceedingly minor.)
The Rear I/O Panel: A Look at the Connections
To help with cooling the board’s circuitry, Asrock opted to leave a fairly large chunk of the rear I/O panel empty and instead perforated it to permit air to flow through. This is, in many ways, a sensible move, as cooling will be critically important on this small board if you were to try and overclock something like a Core i9-11900K. Due to the power-hungry nature of that chip, these air holes will likely prove beneficial even if you don’t overclock.
This added cooling comes at the cost of a less robust rear I/O panel, but there’s enough here that I personally have no complaints. All the basics are still here, including an RJ-45 jack for wired Internet, an optical S/PDIF port, and five 3.5mm audio connections. Also here: two antenna hookups for the board’s built-in wireless chip, as well as HDMI and DisplayPort outputs for the processor’s integrated graphics processor, or IGP. (The last are useful assuming you didn’t opt for a Comet Lake or Rocket Lake “F”-line chip without an IGP.)
The biggest loss comes in the number of USB ports. Most motherboards I review have eight or more USB ports on the rear I/O panel, but those typically are larger ATX boards. You don’t get quite that many on the Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4, but you do get five USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports and a Thunderbolt 4 USB Type-C port. That’s still perfectly acceptable for the form factor.
Asrock added a button for clearing the CMOS on the rear I/O panel, as well, but you don’t get a button for flashing the BIOS.
A Brief Look at the BIOS
The BIOS on this motherboard is similar to the one used by Asrock on most of its high-end motherboards (most of which are branded as the Taichi line), though it does have a Phantom Gaming aesthetic applied to it. There’s an EZ Mode BIOS interface that serves as the first and main page of the BIOS.
From here, you can see the status of the CPU and a few fans, as well as make a few minor changes to core system stuff, such as changing the memory profile or the boot order. If you don’t plan to overclock, you probably don’t need to go past this page.
Pressing F6 gets you into the Advanced BIOS menu, and from here you have access to dozens of other options for adjusting the system’s settings.
Arguably the most important section here is the OC Tweaker tab, which provides you with a plethora of options for tweaking the clock speed of your CPU and RAM.
The BIOS also has a built-in hardware monitor and a tools section that has options for cleaning all data off an SSD, which is useful to use on SSDs that you plan to resell, to ensure none of your data can be recovered from it.
The Supporting Software
After installing Windows, you’ll need to connect to the internet before you will be able to install all of the software and drivers that come with this board. After getting online the first time, I was able to install everything else without any issues, but I do prefer when everything can be installed without the internet (say, from a flash key) as it keeps things simple.
Asrock includes a bundle of programs with the Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4, not all particularly useful. The board includes a trial version of Norton Antivirus, but unless you actually want to buy the software, the trial won’t do you much good. Also aboard: a program that will restart the board into the BIOS, which is surprisingly useful if you are working on overclocking or doing something else that requires you to dive into the BIOS a lot. That means less frantic F-key jamming at bootup to get in there. (Otherwise, you can ignore it.)
Among the more likely useful apps is Asrock’s Polychrome RGB software, which can control any Polychrome-compliant RGB lights connected to the board, and an app-shop program that can help keep your board’s drivers up to date. A reskinned Phantom Gaming version of Asrock’s usual in-Windows motherboard utility comes with the board, too, useful if you like checking your system’s operation conditions, or if you are toying with overclocking.
Z590, Stable and Small
Asrock’s Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 motherboard didn’t leave us much to critique. There’s nothing revolutionary about the board, but solid operation and smart layout make it a solid citizen among small Z590 boards, on a platform perhaps a bit less suited to small designs than most. (That’s due to Rocket Lake’s power consumption, and again, lack of low-end CPU options.) Its networking and audio hardware are exactly what you would expect to see on a high-end board. The board’s ports are placed in reasonably easy-to-access locations. The onboard BIOS is cleanly laid out and should be easy enough for even beginners to use.
None of this may sound particularly impressive when said like that, but the key is in the details. What makes this a fine board isn’t that it does something no other board can do, but in the lack of unforced errors. The price is elevated compared to a standard ATX board, but that’s the norm for Mini-ITX products. With a competitive price and great execution, this is a great pick for Mini-ITX on the Z590 platform…insofar as the Rocket Lake chip you can get makes sense in a small PC.
