Great Mini-ITX boards are hard to come by and the ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac happens to be one that made it to the list. Priced at RM 959, this sub RM 1,000 motherboard is one feature rich board that looks great and works great.
The board itself looks premium, at a glance you’ll see that the 2 pieces of heatsink draw the most attention.
Placed next to the heatsink near the I/O components are the 8 Power Phase (2 on the other side near the socket). The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac comes with premium 60A power choke and dual-stack MOSFET, not forgetting Nichicon 12K Black capacitors.
Close to the DIMM slots are 2 power connectors for CPU fan, they support PWM and the 2nd one also caters for water pump configuration.
I’m very particular about the SATA port placements on Mini-ITX board and I find that ASRock did it right with this one. Instead of cluttering the SATA ports together, what ASRock did was it have 2 SATA ports near the USB connector so you need not route the SATA cable across the RAM modules.
Should you need to use the additional SATA ports, there is sufficient room to route SATA cables around the DIMM clips.
On this part of down the ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac features a steel PCI-E slot for reinforced handling of heavy graphics card, and it has the Ultra M.2 secure point – but where’s the M.2 slot?
The Ultra M.2 slot is cleverly placed on the under-side, just lovely! That also means you can’t access it without first removing the board from the casing.
Lastly the I/O ports – so lovely looking, especially that it has HDMI port that supports 4K at 60Hz, a DisplayPort, a Thunderbolt / USB 3.1 Type-C connector, Intel Gigabit LAN and even Wi-Fi capability!
Lastly ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac comes with a simple package which includes a neat looking I/O plate and a Wi-Fi antenna.
User Experience
The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac was used to test the Intel Core i7-7700K and I’m very pleased that it managed to push the CPU to its limits.
No doubt there’s always the OC Formula range that’s ASRock’s best when it comes to overclocking features but the Gaming model here is plenty sufficient for most people, in fact experienced overclockers could still get quite a lot of juice out of the available features.
The Verdict
The ASRock Z270 Gaming-ITX/ac is one awesome board, feature rich and cleverly supports Ultra M.2 devices by placing it on the under side. This lovely board with beautiful red colored heatsink retails at RM 959 and it comes with 3 years warranty. Do remember to visit the official product page.
