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ASRock has a history of cramming an inordinate amount of power in a small space, so maximizing the potential of Intel’s 10th gen platform on an ITX board doesn’t come as much of a surprise. ASRock’s new Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 marries Intel’s Z490 chipset with a 9-phase, 90A actively cooled VRM for overclocking support for Intel’s 10-core Core i9-10900K with premium features like 2.5Gb Ethernet, Intel WIFi 6, and even on-board Thunderbolt 3. It certainly looks great on paper, but how does it actually perform? Read on to find out!

PC Test Bench would like to thank ASRock for sending us the Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 check out!

ASRock’s Take on the Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3:

Phantom Gaming is designed by gamers and for gamers! Underneath its relentless appearance lie plentiful gaming-oriented features and excellent gaming capabilities. It’s all about bringing a new gaming experience to gamers!

Optimized for Water Cooling – XXL Aluminum Alloy Heatsink with Active FAN Design

XXL Aluminum Alloy Heatsink design with an active fan that effectively improves heat dissipation and promotes overall performance. This is aimed for die-hard gamers and enthusiasts to bring a new computing experience paired with Intel’s 10-core processors.

Thunderbolt™ 3 Technology

Thunderbolt™ 3 technology brings speed and versatility to the most advanced USB Type-C, offering a fast and simple level of connection for work or home. It enables lightning-fast data transfer up to 40Gbps and connects up to 3 Thunderbolt™ 3 devices with a single wire, and even provides quick charging with 5V@3A (15W). Just experience the world’s fastest connectivity with Thunderbolt™ ready motherboards!

Base Frequency Boost (BFB) Technology

Whoever said that only K series CPUs and the Z-family platform are capable of being performed with maximum power. Via ASRock BFB (Boost Frequency Boost) Technology, users may install their non-K series CPUs to ASRock’s selected 400 series motherboards and enjoy the base frequency boost with the hidden power of processors immediately.

Features:

Supports 10th Gen and future generation Intel® Core™ Processors (Socket 1200)

Supports DDR4 4666MHz+ (OC)

1 PCIe 3.0 x16

Graphics Output Options: HDMI, DisplayPort, Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3

1 CH HD Audio (Realtek ALC1220 Audio Codec), Nahimic Audio

4 SATA3, 2 Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3)

1 Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3 Type-C

3 USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gb/s (Rear)

4 USB 3.2 Gen1 5Gb/s (2 Front, 2 Rear)

Intel® Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax (2.4Gbps) + BT 5.1

Phantom Gaming 2.5 Gigabit LAN

Polychrome SYNC

Quick Specs:

LGA1200 Socket – Supports Intel 10th Generation Core Processors

Mini-ITX Form-Factor

9-phase Digi Power

Intel Z490 Chipset

2x DDR4 memory slots – Supports 4666MHz+ OC, max 64GB, Supports ECC memory

On-board Thunderbolt 3

HDMI 2.0 and Displayport 1.4

5Gb Realtek Dragon LAN

Intel WiFi 6 2×2 + Bluetooth 5.1

Dual M.2 slots – support PCIe 3.0 and SATA drives up to 80mm long.

8 Layer, 2-oz Copper PCB

A Closer Look

Like most ITX boards, ASRock’s Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 comes in a deceptively small box. The Phantom Gaming branding is quite prevalent.

Inside the box, you get the following inclusions:

Quick Installation Guide

Software Setup Guide

Phantom Gaming Postcard

Support CD

2 x Serial ATA (SATA) Data Cables

1 x ASRock WiFi 2.4/5 GHz Antenna

2 x Screws for M.2 Sockets

Reusable Cable wraps.

ASRock’s Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 follows the standard Mini-ITX form-factor. Intel’s LGA1200 socket sits nearly in the center of the board with two full-sized DDR4 ram slots to the right. The rear I/O is covered sans a vent for active cooling on the VRM. The top segment of the VRM also has a fan.

Like most ITX boards, there are a ton of components on the rear of the board. The only thing of note here is the second M.2 slot that supports 2280 drives only and can work with PCIe 3.0 or SATA drives.

The rear I/O cover is pre-installed and floats a few millimetres in each direction for the perfect installation in any case. It has the following:

Intel WiFi 6 802.11ax Antenna Ports

HDMI 2.0 Port

DisplayPort 1.4

Optical SPDIF Out Port

3 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A Ports (10 Gb/s)

Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps Type-C Port (Also functions as a USB 3.2 Gen2 10Gbps)

PS/2 mouse/keyboard port.

2x USB 3.2 Gen1 Ports

(Dragon RTL8125BG based 2.5Gb RJ-45 Ethernet

Clear CMOS Button

Gold Audio Jacks

A tall riser card just above the PCIe slot holds far more than the obvious primary M.2 slot.

You get a speaker header, USB 2.0 header, a pair of SATA ports, and even some diagnostic LED’s.

The card is quite tall, as is the VRM heat sink, so be careful if you are planning on a super-compact build.

The bottom edge of the board only has the main PCIe x16 slot. On a side note, it supports PCIe bifurcation riser cards to split into x8/x8 or x8/x4/x4 slots.

The front edge of the board has the front panel I/O header, a fan header, a pair of SATA ports, a USB 3.0 header, the main 24-pin power, and an RGB header.

The top edge of the board has two more fan headers, a digital/addressable RGB header, an actively cooled VRM heat sink, and the 8-pin EPS power connector for the CPU.

Cooling on the Phantom Gaming ITX is pretty robust. Even the chipset is cooled with a heat pipe to the active rear VRM segment, and the main M.2 sinks heat into this as well.

Under the Hood

Getting all the covers off is quite an involved process, and given that you have to peel the cover plate off of its double-sided tape covered home to even get started, we don’t recommend doing this yourself.

With all of that out of the way, we can start to get a look at the board. There is quite a pile of fan wiring for the actively cooled VRM heatsinks but it all goes back to one header.

The CPU socket is driven from a 9-phase VRM set up in what appears to be a 6+2+1 setup for Vcore, VCCIO, and VCCSA.

The VRM is controlled from an Intersil ISL69269 PWM controller.

The power stages themselves are 90A rated Digi-power Intersil ISL99390 smart power stages.

Back near the I/O is Intel’s T803A900 Titan Ridge Thunderbolt controller. This controller is capable of supporting dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, but ASRock only puts one to use here.

Realtek’s Dragon RTL8125BG 2.5Gb LAN controller is their first single-chip 2.5GBE controller.

A single memory phase is provided by a Texas Instruments 53355dqp 30A Synchronous Buck Converter.

BIOS

ASRock starts you out in the ‘EZ Mode’ of the BIOS. You get a quick rundown of everything in the PC, as well as some basic options like turning on RAID or XMP.

Hitting F6 brings you to an advanced mode where all of the settings live. The Main tab is more of a landing page showing basic system specs.

The OC Tweaker page is where most will spend the most time. You can also save 10 different profiles and load them as you please.

Clock speeds, multipliers, voltages, and the works can all be found under here in their respective sub-menus.

The Advanced page lets you dive a little deeper into certain areas like I/O or USB configuration.

Each of the advanced pages offers some important but less often needed settings.

The tools page is an important one and was our first stop to update our system to the latest available BIOS.

The hardware monitor is pretty self-explanatory. You can keep tabs on all system voltages, temperatures, fan speeds, and everything else related here.

You can also tune all of your connected fans from here.

Most enthusiasts probably won’t use anything in the security tab, but a BIOS password can be set here as well as turning on the Trusted Platform module if installed, handy if you deploy this board in an office or similar environment.

Here in the Boot tab, you can configure things like boot order, and even turn off the full-screen boot logo if you prefer to see a quick summary instead.

And last but not least the Exit Tab, you can save or discard changes made this session, as well as restore defaults. You can also override boot settings to boot to a different device just this one time.

Software

ASRock Polychrome SYNC

Now you can adjust the RGB LED color through the ASRock Polychrome SYNC Utility. Download this utility from the ASRock Live Update & APP Shop and start coloring your PC style your way!

The very first time we can it, it had to update the onboard controller firmware. This was quick, and only happened once, so no worries.

Once in, you have quite a few options and effects to choose from. Our ram and even RGB M.2 drive showed up and were easily controllable as well.

ASRock Motherboard Utility (Phantom Gaming Tuning)

Phantom Gaming Tuning is ASRock’s A-Tuning multi-purpose software suite with a new themed interface, more new features, and improved utilities.

Setting a profile is as easy as a single click, but you can also manually overclock from here as well.

You can also tune fans and keep tabs on all of your system information.

ASRock Phantom Gaming LAN Software

Live Update & App Shop

ASRock’s consolidated Live Update & App Shop is a handy tool to get everything installed all at once. You can grab all of the latest drivers and utilities from one location, as well as some suggested software like Google Chrome.

ASRock’s one-stop-shop for grabbing all needed utilities and the latest drivers in only a couple clicks makes system setup a snap.

Restart to UEFI

With as fast as computers can boot it is difficult to impossible to get back into the BIOS, this handy utility reboots you directly into it.

Performance Testing

Test Platform:

CPU – Intel Core i9-10900K Mobo – ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 RAM – 16GB (2x8GB) HyperX Fury RGB 3200MHz C16 GPU – Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition SSD – Viper VPR100 RGB 1TB PSU – Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB Gold 750W Chassis – Open BenchTable Cooling – Custom Liquid Loop (EKWB Velocity CPU Block, EKWB PE240 Rad, 1x DDC Pump)

All testing is performed at default “out of the box” settings except for enabling XMP (Profile 1: 3200MHz 16-18-18-38 1.35V).

General Performance Testing

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is the complete benchmark for the modern office. It is the ideal test for organizations that are evaluating PCs for a workforce with a range of performance needs. The tests in this benchmark cover a wide range of activities from everyday productivity tasks to demanding work with digital media content. PCMark 10 uses a modular approach to build relevant benchmark tests around common end-user scenarios. A Test Group is a collection of workloads that share a common theme or purpose. There are four test groups in PCMark 10, we use three of them. Essentials: covers the common, everyday ways that people use a PC. The workloads include Web Browsing, Video Conferencing, and App Start-up time. Productivity: measures system performance with everyday office applications. This test group includes Spreadsheets and Writing workloads. Digital Content Creation: This test group’s workload reflects the demands of working with digital content and media. The tests include Photo Editing, Video Editing, and Rendering and Visualization.

It’s always fun to see an ITX board keep up with full-sized boards.

WebXPRT 2015

WebXPRT 2013 uses scenarios created to mirror the tasks you do every day to compare the performance of almost any Web-enabled device. It contains four HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads: Photo Effects, Face Detect, Stocks Dashboard, and Offline Notes. WebXPRT is run with the latest stable release version of Google Chrome browser, in this case, Version 61.

In our browser-based test, the pint-sized Phantom Gaming board actually leads the pack.

CPU Performance Testing

Super PI Modded 1.5

“In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi in collaboration with Dr.Y.Kanada at the computer center. This record should be the current world record. (Details are shown in the windows help.) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environments such as Windows NT and Windows 95. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with a Pentium 90 MHz, 40 MB main memory, and 340 MB available storage.”

In this single-threaded test, the 10900K stays pegged at 5.3GHz the entire time which results in the fastest stock speed here we’ve seen to date.

CINEBENCH R15

“CINEBENCH is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus, and much more.

CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free.”

We again see a single thread just blast ahead at full tilt for minutes on end for a killer score, but with all ten cores in play, it falls back to second place.

CINEBENCH R20

Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user. Best of all: It’s free.

The same trend continues under Cinebench R20, but sustained all-core use certainly falls back to 4.9GHz around Intel’s standard time as expected.

Passmark Performance Test – CPU Mark

“Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing, and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test ™ allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.”

Passmark’s full system test comes in a few points behind full-sized boards, with around 1k fewer points on the overall score.

SiSoft Sandra – Cryptographic Bandwidth

“SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems–or potential headaches.”

Sisoft registered about 1.5GB/s less on CPU based cryptographic bandwidth as well, another all-core test.

Black Hole 4.2

Let the beast run and benchmark your system in three different tests (Multithreaded, Single-threaded & 4-Threaded) that will test your CPU to the very limit, and score you among hundreds of other systems that have tested.

Multithreaded will test your CPU’s efficiency of running more than one thread without major system lag. The higher you score on this one, the more threads your CPU can handle with a comfortable speed. High multithreaded scores generally mean you can render things faster.

4-Threaded tests your CPU’s performance in games since most games currently run on 4 threads.

Single-threaded evaluates how fast the CPU can handle a single, dedicated thread for processing.

Blackhole runs a single-threaded test, a four threaded test, and an all core. The Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 knocks it out of the park on the first two tests and does decently on the all core test for a mid-place run.

Workstation Testing

Blender Benchmark 2.82 – BMW27

A new platform to collect and display the results of hardware and software performance tests. Aimed at an optimal comparison between system hardware and installations using open source software and testing content in the public domain.

Our Blender render comes in at 2 minutes and barely over 5 seconds, very close to the rest of the boards.

POV-Ray 3.7 Standard Benchmark – CPU

POV Ray’s standard benchmark comes in a fraction of a second behind the leader, but the spread here is very small.

7-Zip

The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with the results of the Intel Core 2 CPU with a multi-threading option switched off. So, if you have a modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with the LZMA method and decompression with the LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 50, the score is taken

ASRock makes just shy of 87,000 MIPS, a really solid score.

System Memory Testing

AIDA64 Engineer Edition

“FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.50 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 1.50 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises. The new AIDA64 update implements AVX-optimized benchmarks for the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors, adds a brand-new video encoding benchmark, and supports the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.”

Memory bandwidth on ASRock’s Z490 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 is solid, but latency is nothing short of spectacular. Sub 50ns latency from a 3200MHz C16 memory kit is just nuts.

Passmark Performance Test – Memory Mark – Threaded

Passmark also shows great memory performance.

SiSoft Sandra – Memory Bandwidth – Aggregate.

“SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems–or potential headaches.”

SiSoft is our only memory test that isn’t placing the ITX/TB3 in first place, but we still see a good score.

Synthetic Game Testing

3DMark – Fire Strike

“Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today’s high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today”

Our first synthetic test puts the Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/PG3 in second place, with first only a couple of points away from first.

3DMark – Time Spy

“3Dmark Time Spy is a new DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spay is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built “the right way” from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards.”

It slips a touch further back on Time Spy, but is still pretty close, only a couple hundred points from first.

Unigine Superposition

Superposition has a small spread on our test samples, but the Phantom Gaming board narrowly misses first place here.

Game Testing

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI

Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known.

Civilization VI offers new ways to engage with your world: cities now physically expand across the map, active research in technology and culture unlocks new potential, and competing leaders will pursue their own agendas based on their historical traits as you race for one of five ways to achieve victory in the game.

Our first real game test of ASRock’s Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 shows it performing well, with an average turn time of nearly exactly 7 milliseconds.

Far Cry 5

Anything can happen. Everything will.

Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult—known as The Project at Eden’s Gate—that is threatening the community’s freedom. Stand up to the cult’s leaders, Joseph Seed, and the Heralds, as you spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community.

Far Cry 5 scores a solid 140FPS on average.

Far Cry New Dawn

Face off against the vicious Highwaymen, led by twin sisters Mickey and Lou, as you fight to survive in a post-apocalyptic frontier set in Hope County, Montana 17 years after the global nuclear catastrophe. Form unexpected alliances, build a deadly arsenal of makeshift weapons using the remnants of the old world.

In New Dawn, we get 125 FPS, a mere 4 FPS from first place.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider Experience Lara Croft’s defining moment as she becomes the Tomb Raider. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara must master a deadly jungle, overcome terrifying tombs, and persevere through her darkest hour. As she races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, Lara will ultimately be forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be.

In Tomb Raiders’ latest installment, the Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 takes first place in our testing.

Ashes of the Singularity

Planet by planet, a war is raging across the galaxy. The technological singularity has given humanity the power to expand further than they ever have before. Now, they compete with each other and their sentient artificial intelligence adversaries for control of newfound worlds.

The Z490 Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 falls a fraction of an FPS behind here, but the spread is pretty minimal.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus is an epic, story-driven first-person shooter from 4A Games that blends deadly combat and stealth with exploration and survival horror in one of the most immersive game worlds ever created.

ASRock scores another 1st place in our last real game test with a touch over 48 FPS average at maximum settings.

Overclocking

We always like to try the included software, so we fire up Phantom Gaming Tuning and toss it into Performance Mode.

Well, so much for that. Our scores actually drop slightly from the 228/2526 score at stock. This isn’t uncommon these days on the red or blue side. CPU manufacturers have gotten extremely good with the algorithms under the hood that keep their chips performing at the bleeding edge of silicon. When you start manually taking control of various aspects, you break this automatic performance, and you can lose a few points.

We reset to default and manually set all cores to 5.0 GHz. Our single thread performance comes back up near default, but we aren’t quite back on par with all cores in action.

We try pushing up to 5.1GHz but our score drops a little further.

Intel’s Extreme Tuning Utility reveals the culprit of our performance loss, we are hitting the Power Limit and throttling back.

Thankfully we can adjust this right from here so we just go ahead and max everything out.

Our next Cinebench run on the Z490 Phantom Gaming shows notable increases without that pesky throttling.

We are able to go ahead and push the clock up to 5.2GHz on all cores and this bumps our score up to almost 2800 points. Not bad!

Final Thoughts & Conclusion

Like we said in the intro of this article, ASRock has a habit of going all-in on ITX boards, even when no one else will and we find yet again they haven’t lost their edge. The Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 offers everything a power user could possibly want in a pint-sized package. Solid power delivery provides great overclocking capability which pretty well ices the cake. Active cooling on the VRM heat-sinks stay all but inaudible, even while overclocking, and the heat-sinks themselves barely get warm, unlike many small boards that will almost burn you after a long render. Connectivity outclasses most full-size systems with Thunderbolt 3, USB 3 10Gbps, 2.5Gbps LAN, and the latest WiFi-6 connectivity. Actually, that verb is probably the most appropriate description of the Phantom Gaming ITX/TB3 – Outclass. Nothing else really needs to be said.

Great Job ASRock!

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ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review ASRock has a history of cramming an inordinate amount of power in a small space, so maximizing the potential of Intel’s 10th gen platform on an ITX board doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

#ASRock #Intel #ITX #Mini-ITX #Phantom Gaming #SFF #Small Form Factor #Thunderbolt