Friday, March 3rd 2017
BIOSTAR Shows off First Mini-ITX Socket AM4 Motherboard
BIOSTAR showed off the industry's first socket AM4 motherboard in the mini-ITX form-factor, the Racing X370-GTN, based on AMD's top of the line X370 chipset. The board draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX and 4-pin CPU power connectors, and supports all models of Ryzen processors, although we're curious how XFR will work with such slim power inputs. The board conditions power for the SoC using a 7-phase VRM.
The socket AM4 chip is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2666 memory; the PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, and since this is an SoC, most of the board's connectivity comes from the processor, too. This includes two out of the board's four SATA 6 Gb/s ports, a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot (reverse side, unseen), 2-4 USB 3.0 ports, and the display I/O. The X370 chipset puts out two additional SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and wires out the HD audio (115 dBA SNR CODEC), and a Realtek DragonLAN GbE controller. The company didn't reveal availability details.
The socket AM4 chip is wired to two DDR4 DIMM slots, supporting up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2666 memory; the PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot, and since this is an SoC, most of the board's connectivity comes from the processor, too. This includes two out of the board's four SATA 6 Gb/s ports, a 32 Gb/s M.2 slot (reverse side, unseen), 2-4 USB 3.0 ports, and the display I/O. The X370 chipset puts out two additional SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and wires out the HD audio (115 dBA SNR CODEC), and a Realtek DragonLAN GbE controller. The company didn't reveal availability details.
19 Comments on BIOSTAR Shows off First Mini-ITX Socket AM4 Motherboard
as far as i understand
That doesn't mean the lower end mITX boards won't use X300/A300 to keep costs down. I expect we'll start to see these come out when the lower end/cost Ryzen processors start to hit the market.
That silver chip near the HDA jacks, that's X300:
That's what the B350 looks like and possibly the X370 and A320 as well.
"Correspondingly, the X300 has no I/O functionality of its own, and exists instead to enable the remaining functionality of a chipset: secure boot, trusted platform module (TPM), and other security-related functionality. These hardware security capabilities fit into a chip the size of the fingernail on a human pinky finger." www.overclockers.com/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu-review/
Also, the CPU to chipset interface is now called UMI - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMI_AMD
Need something with a bit more oomph than the craptop I'm currently using. Blender tends to bring it to its knees.
Other than that - I like it a lot.
Also a very nice option for upcoming 9000-series APUs!