Conclusion

Final Words 

We absolutely have a soft spot for small form factor motherboards, it amazes me how much kit you can cram in and on there. The ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 hits that soft spot alright, I really like it (aside from having a far too long name). With this 17x17cm motherboard you gain all the features that come with X570, including PCIe Gen 4.0 lanes and interconnect as well as really sweet AX WIFI6. The pricing ain't wrong either as it sits in a very comfortable € 245,- and USD range. 

There are two things you need to be aware of though. The first is that your M2 SSD will not and cannot have a heatsink since it'll be located at the backside of the PCB. There is not enough clearance between the motherboard tray and the M2 unit to manually apply one either. Secondly, the chipset fan can be heard. At default settings, it's even quite loud. In the BIOS you can select a 'silent' preset, which helps out greatly. However, during extended stress situations, we could still hear it spin up, annoyingly. I wish ASRock would have gone with a more silent fan. With normal usage and IDle PC levels however at the Silent setting, that fan indeed is silent. 

ABBA - Mamma Mia

This article is a bit of a combo review on the motherboard tested, as well as a comparison between the recent AMD AGESA firmware update 1.0.0.3 ABBA. For those that have not heard about it, recently it became apparent that Ryzen processors sometimes did not reach it's advertised clock frequencies, specifically the single-core Boost frequency. Some processors ran fine, some faster, but the majority is a notch lower on that turbo bin in terms of 50 and some even 100 MHz. The new AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABBA revision fixes that problem. In our case we ran pre- and post-tests with an ABB ASRock v1.20 BIOS and the new ASRock v1.70 ABBA based firmware.

Firmware	Single core (1t)	All cores (16t)
AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABB	43.8 GHz	41.3 GHz
AGESA 1.0.0.3 ABBA	44 GHz	41.4 GHz

As you can see, our processor was not very susceptible to the problem with only a 20 MHz differential on that single core boost. Ergo the outcome for falls within a reasonable margin of error. Overall the wen ABBA Firmware obviously is recommended, as for poorly threaded games it's certainly going to help (a tiny bit). That said, the offset varies per processor and for you, the difference could be more significant. For us however, the margin of error is so small that it falls within a margin of error. Please do upgrade to the latest available BIOS. 

DDR4 Memory

Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen optimized kits out there. With Ryzen Generation 3 you can go higher in DDR4 clock frequency if you want to. We advise a DDR4 frequency up-to 3600 MHz, after that frequency value a 2:1 divider kicks in, and that can have an effect on the Infinity Fabric bandwidth, inter-core CCX bandwidth. CL16 is fine CL14 preferred. We see no reason for faster DDR4 memory other than bragging rights anyway, it's expensive and does not bring in added perf, much like what you see on Intel platforms as well. So my advice is a proper 3200 MHz frequency for the memory and maximum 3600 MHz, CL14 would be awesome of course especially since DDR4 prices have been on the decline for a year now.

Energy efficiency

With these processors now fabbed at 7nm you may see some interesting energy efficiency, the 65 Watts for the 3700X is, of course, amazing all by itself. The 12 core 3900X, however, is listed at a TDP of 105 Watts. Mind you these are numbers at nominal load. Not your continuous power draw. Overall the 3700X was idling a bit higher than expected, but that is likely due to the massively outfitted motherboard (extra ICs do use extra power). The load values are excellent. The 3900X did show roughly the same idle load, ergo read my previous statement on the motherboard. The load values with 12 cores stressed topped 227 Watts (entire PC), which was just 20 Watts more than a stressed 9900K. So yeah, it's all good there. 

The conclusion

In this first line of the conclusion I am going to remind you guys again about the oddity with this ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 motherboard, being AMD AM4 socket based, you need to apply an LGA 115x compatible cooler (!). This is due to spacing constraints, ASROCK applied an Intel LGA 115x mounting hole and you need to fit a compatible cooler. The reality with the available mounting clearance is that you need some soft of LCS on there (much like we did). No biggy, but be aware of it. Any if not all coolers have a LGA 115x mounting kit, but even normal sized heatpipe coolers would never fir. LCS / 115x  and you're good to go though.  The ITX motherboard at 17x17cm manages to impress as it offers good connectivity and pretty much all the features you need. Other than that you get it all from proper M.2 performance however not cooled by a heatsink, a fill speed x16 PCIe Gen 4.0 GPU slot, four SATA3 slots, some good USB connectivity you need and overall a lovely looking product. BTW the TB3 is short for Thunderbolt 3, so the small USB Type-C connector on the rear panel actually is capable of 40 Gbit/s. For this ITX form factor a plus, of course, is the PCIe Gen 4.0 infrastructure the X570 platform with Ryzen 3000 offers. It does open up a plethora of faster storage options. The question is, does that warrant the 399 EUR and 359 USD price tag? I honestly don't think so unless you really want PCIe 4.0 on that chipset. Personally, I would settle with a fast PCIe Gen 3.0 storage unit, so X470 is fine as well. Make no mistake. The DDR4 memory worked straight out of the box, we enabled the 3600 MHz XMP and as well as 3200 MHz CL14 G.Skill memory kit, that immediately kicked in. Tweaking wise, the motherboards will not be a limitation, the processors however are. It is a near-perfect little motherboard, I say near as the chipset cooler should have been more silent and a Multi-GigE jack for Ethernet would have been nice as well. Other than the LCS / 115x cooler mounting oddity, we can highly recommend this product as even the price is fair at under 250 bucks.

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