Product on Review: ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac
Manufacturer: ASRock
Street Price: GBP £119.99 / USD $119.99 / AUS $179.00
A few weeks back, we looked at the ASRock B450M Pro4 and were impressed by its value for money and performance figures compared to similar X470 chipset boards. This time around weve dropped a Mini-ITX ASRock board onto the test bench to see how well other models in their line-up perform.
The ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming-ITX/ac is a tiny little motherboard designed to give you the best possible performance in the smallest package. The board itself measures 170mm x 170mm with small heatsinks and space-saving features to make a powerful, yet small, workstation or media PC.
Despite the Fatal1ty Gaming-ITX/acs small stature, its packed full of features including WiFi, M.2 NVMe storage options and Nichicon audio, making this ideal to be used as a small gaming PC.
Lending itself further to the gaming-orientation of this motherboard is the Fatal1ty branding, a brand which has, no doubt, been around longer than some of the readers of this article. The Fatal1ty brand has been adopted by manufacturers for years, usually being deemed as a pre-cursor to items with a clear design aim towards gaming.
You may be a little put off by the lack of stature, assuming it wont perform as well as a larger motherboard, well read on to see how it performs.
ASRock on the B450 Fatal1ty Gaming ITX/ac:
The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX Mini-ITX motherboard offers a reinforced PCI-Express 3.0 slot with a full x16 lanes of connectivity for powerful graphics cards. The two RAM slots support up to 32 GB of DDR4 RAM at a frequency of up to 2.933 Megahertz and can even be overclocked to rates of up to 3.200 MHz.
An M.2 slot with PCIe- and SATA connectivity is available due to the motherboard being AM4-compatible. It comes with four PCI-Express Lanes and connects to the chipset with the SATA6G protocol. M.2 SSDs use the advanced NVM-Express protocol (NVMe) and support, thanks to the PCI-Express 3.0 connectivity, speeds of up to eight times faster than those of SATA 6G hard drives. This means data transfer speeds of up to 32 Gbit/s are possible.
The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX offers a USB 3.1 Type C connector as well as a USB 3.1 Type A connection. The USB Type C port can be inserted in either orientation and is especially slim. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is capable of achieving speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s per port and USB ports supporting this standard are generally compatible with smartphones and tablets that offer fast charging. For CPUs with integrated graphics, like AMD's Raven Ridge APUs, the board offers an HDMI- and a DisplayPort connector.
An M.2 slot with PCIe- and SATA connectivity is available due to the motherboard being AM4-compatible. It comes with four PCI-Express Lanes and connects to the chipset with the SATA6G protocol. M.2 SSDs use the advanced NVM-Express protocol (NVMe) and support, thanks to the PCI-Express 3.0 connectivity, speeds of up to eight times faster than those of SATA 6G hard drives. This means data transfer speeds of up to 32 Gbit/s are possible.
The ASRock B450 Gaming ITX offers a USB 3.1 Type C connector as well as a USB 3.1 Type A connection. The USB Type C port can be inserted in either orientation and is especially slim. USB 3.1 Gen 2 is capable of achieving speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s per port and USB ports supporting this standard are generally compatible with smartphones and tablets that offer fast charging. For CPUs with integrated graphics, like AMD's Raven Ridge APUs, the board offers an HDMI- and a DisplayPort connector.
