ASRock managed to inject quite a few features into a 17x17cm motherboard, a Mini-ITX sized motherboard. The ultimate Mini-ITX has to have everything, X299E-ITX/ac was built on a X299 platform to give... ASRock X299E-ITX/ac A Very Tiny Mini ITX LGA2066 Motherboard
I am legitimately impressed with this. They managed to keep quad channel this time (they didn't with the x99 m-ITX). wonder how it would handle a 7820x?
no the CPU is bigger than itx form factor ((maybe i am trolling lol )) not sure of that as the mATX have the 4 of them... anyway about the 7820X i guess it would be nice on WC as those too become smaller with time and more effective.
This is some seriously impressive engineering, but I see this as being a very niche product, even moreso than the other X299 boards. Unless you're using one of the i7s or worse, a lot of the PCIe lanes will go to waste. Available PSUs and cooling methods to accommodate the CPU are also going to be pretty bulky. This platform would make for the best ITX build you can make, but for X299 (or X399) I'd rather have micro ATX. You'd get a slightly larger chassis but a whole lot more options, and likely a cheaper motherboard (in the event one is ever made).
Asrock...rocks. i have been a bit more than underwhelmed with x299 since the launch. there has been nothing on the mobo front to pique my interest until now. now there's a usage scenario with Kaby LakeX that make sense. expensive sense, but sense.
Socket TR4 can fit in ITX, in theory. Take a look at the full size ATX boards: some of them have the first PCIe slot directly below the I/O panel. The real challenge with an ITX TR build would actually be finding a place to put the chipset. If a manufacturer did the same sorts of things ASRock did with this X299 board, everything could fit, except the chipset. That would also likely need to be mounted on a separate card, unless you start removing things like SATA or other headers. What kind of surprises me is why nobody has bothered to create a daughterboard for ITX. So basically the bottom (and larger) layer has the I/O ports, the PCIe x16 slot, the M.2 slots, the chipset, and if there's room, the 24-pin power connector. The bottom layer would also have most/all of the header pins and SATA ports, but angled at 90 degrees. Then, the top layer would contain the CPU socket, RAM slots, VRM, 8-pin power connectors, and maybe the M.2 slot for wifi. Since you're probably going to water-cool this system anyway, I don't think another few cm of elevation is a big deal. You might be thinking that the 4000+ pin CPU would complicate communication to the bottom layer, but I don't think it would: * Roughly half of the pins in socket TR4 are useless; about half of them are meant for the additional 2 dies supplied by Epyc. AMD made the sockets similar because it was cheaper to just recycle the same socket. * Though I don't know how many of them there are, a good chunk of the pins of the CPU are used for ground and power delivery, making the remaining ~2000 pins not seem so high. Remember, the VRM and 8-pin power connectors are supplied on the daughterboard too. * The CPU supplies up to 64 PCIe lanes, but the motherboard will be using less than half that. I have no idea how many pins are dedicated for PCIe but I imagine ignoring at least 32 of them would substantially reduce the complexity. * There may be quad-channel memory, but that too is on the top-layer board. So all that being said, I can't imagine it'd be too complex or expensive to connect the two boards. Probably never going to happen, but I at least think it's cool to think about.
Will never happen, socket just takes way too much space. They would have to omit a PCIe slot or vrm above cpu. But then there's not room else where to put things.
