ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 LGA 1700 Intel Z690 SATA 6Gb/s DDR5 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

Going into this build I didn't really know what to expect, It's my first time ever building a pc + I'm using an Alienware case that's old. Besides that, I've never touched a motherboard/ pc component. So going into this being afraid is an understatement. For the price the board is really solid, I tried doing research as much as possible, so if you are a first time pc builder. One piece of information I can give you is that this board fits Intel's 12th series CPU to its most current 14 series. If you need to check this in the future, search up ASRock z690 Pro RS on google and go into their website. From there go to support and click the CPU support list. It will show you all the types of compatibility it has. Another good thing about the board is that once I got into the BIOS, it was super super super simple. They literally have a mode called "easy mode" to simplify the user interface. From there you can monitor your Fans RPM and other things. ONE IMPORTANT THING, If you are using an AIO (all in one water cooler) YOU NEED NEED NEED, to go into advanced setting in the BIOS and going to "H/W Monitor'', and change which ever port you had to W_PUMP, by default it's going to be CPUFAN_1 or whatever number you connect it to. If you don't do this your CPU will overheat since it's not recognizing it as a water pump. One last thing I recommend while you're still in the advanced settings is to go into the advance with a star next to it, click "Chipset Config" and scroll down to " Turn on onboard led in s5" and disable this. If you don't disable this, then your RGB lights on the board wont turn off after you've shut down completely. I will include photos to make it a little easier to understandPROS:-Very budget friendly for 12th gen-current gen CPU's-Nice looking motherboard-Nice RGB lights-Simple User interface-Booting up windows a pop up shows to install recent driverCONS:-Some settings like XMP 2.0 require a little digging-Motherboard RGB lights stay on if you don't change a settingOverall a really solid budget motherboard

You might find this an odd choice for an Unraid build, with only 3 onboard SATA ports, and you'd be right! But the RackChoice 2U Micro ATX (Mini ITX) server chassis I was using, model 238C-A, was really tight with 3.5 drives + mobo, even with the mini ITX form factor. I only used 3 of the 4 bays for 18TB HDDs, so 3 SATA ports was all I needed. I installed an ICY DOCK 8x 2.5 enclosure in the 2x 5.25 bays, filled with 8 SSDs, attached to a SAS 9300-8I HBA, and I'm good to go. The ICY DOCK SFF-8643 ports/cables help a lot with cable management, too. Using i5-12600K CPU.

I love this motherboard. Very stable, no voltage issues, even with a i9 12900k plugged into the socket. Has a great Wi-Fi chip preinstalled into the board. I'm basically getting ethernet speeds from Wi-Fi while in the basement. Bios is easy to understand and work with. The RGB effect is also very pretty.Tons of SATA ports and just plugs in general for things like case fans. You could easily use this as a home server board. Price is also a steal for what you are getting.As for cons: there should have been three 4x4 m.2 slots instead of the two 4x4 slots and one 3x4 slot. That and a somewhat low amount of USB ports. Not super low, but its noticeable if you have a lot of peripheralsOverall I highly recommend. Buy this board.

Upgraded BIOS to the latest version and it works with a 13th gen CPU, it's great with my 13700KUEFI is fine, there's an Easy mode and a Pro mode, you can mess with a lot. It's not as "nice looking" as the MSI UEFI that I'm used to but I don't think anybody actually cares how nice a UEFI looks lolDefault fan ramping is very aggressive.This is the only thing I own with a proper MIMO Wi-Fi antenna, it's impressiveWhen I got Windows installed, ASRock's own driver installer seem to have been downloaded from Microsoft automatically. After I let it install/update the ASRock specific drivers, it didn't seem to bother me ever again, which is good, no bloatThe small size, beefy heatsinks, and metal backplate, all make this feel very tough during assemblyThere's a heat pipe from the side VRMs to the main "heatsink". Is it really a heatsink? It's a gigantic chunk of aluminum, I don't see any way for airflow though. This might be one of the reasons the other reviewer said the VRMs run hotThe PCB's silkscreen text is tight, be extra careful in reading it and understanding it

I went with this board as it had 8 SATA ports, 2 more over any other manufacture. While it has 1 less M.2 slot compared to others I really needed 7 SATA ports to avoid having to buy a SATA PCIe card.I had everything installed and find out that backing up my documents which I occasionally do for an extra level of protection started failing. It was failing to burn while the process was happening while other times it was during the verification process. This same burner worked perfectly fine in my previous build with Windows 11. SATA to USB with this burner worked fine. I bought the PCIe SATA card and everything worked. So the issue is either with the board, IRST (Raid enabled) or some setting in the BIOS. I know I am in a small group but reaching out to AsRock has been abysmal. At first they said the board was faulty which I disagreed with them on. Then I reached out to see if they could replicate this and they completely ignored me. This is not off to a good start but I will keep the board because no sense in switching it since I still need to use the SATA PCIe card. Just a bit salty they didn't even want to replicate this bug.

I wanted a nice new ITX motherboard to make a compact desktop for my office. I put in Crucial DDR5 memory and Samsung 990 NVMe M.2 drives and it works great - very pleased.