Asrock's Z270M-STX Barebones system

[TheRandomness]

Asrock have shown off (the motherboard for) their deskmini Z270 motherboard and barebones system, and oh my god it's small. At under 3 litres and featuring an MXM slot, it's going to be the most power-dense barebones system that's avalible on the market. For those who don't know, STX is Intel's new SFF board standard, measuring ~5x5 inches. Asrock extended that standard to inclue an MXM slot.

WARNING lots of pictures:

Spoiler

 

 

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Flipping the board over we find the same laptop-style SATA connectors on the bottom-right edge of the board (bottom-left in the picture) then next to them is the absolutely insane three (yes, three!) PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2260/2280 SSD ports and the M.2 WiFi card slot.

The board features 4 M.2 slots.. Holy shit  3 of which are PCIe 3.0 x4, and 1 being for a wifi card.

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For the front connectors we have a microphone jack, USB 3.0 Type-A port, a USB 3.1 Type-C Thunderbolt 3 port (could you hook a eGPU dock to this for SLI/XFire?!), and a headphone jack.

And on the rear we have an Intel Gigabit NIC, 1x HDMI for the graphics card output, 4-pin DIN DC jack, 2x USB 3.0, and 1x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI 2.0, and 1x Mini-DP.

Yay it's fully featured on the front and rear

 

The system will be able to accept up to 120W MXM cards, which will be provided with the barebones system (So basically, a GTX 1060 or RX 480/470/460 will be able to be used) but higher powered cards could be used if a more powerful power brick is used. Cooling will be handled by some sort of downdraft cooler, but no other pictures have appeared of it, and therefore we can't really say much about it other than it uses heatpipes and what looks to be a 90mm fan.

 

Sources:

https://smallformfactor.net/news/asrock-z270m-stx-mxm-pictured

https://www.cool3c.com/article/116315/CES-2017-華擎展出具可擴充-MXM-獨立顯示卡的-micro-STX-主機板原型主機

[Guest]

Good luck getting 5ghz with that cooler on 7700k

[Misanthrope]

Meh. I like the idea but until MXM gpus become commonplace its too much of a limiting factor. 

[wadeak78]

14 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

Good luck getting 5ghz with that cooler on 7700k

You actually can't overclock at all on this system.

 

[TheRandomness]

8 minutes ago, wadeak78 said:

You actually can't overclock at all on this system.

 

Z270 says otherwise. 

14 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Meh. I like the idea but until MXM gpus become commonplace its too much of a limiting factor. 

You can obtain MXM modules quite easily tbh. 

[Guest]

9 minutes ago, wadeak78 said:

You actually can't overclock at all on this system.

 

Why not? 

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, TheRandomness said:

Z270 says otherwise. 

You can obtain MXM modules quite easily tbh. 

1) Usually either really expensive workstation ones or crap Laptop ones

 

2) I think you're overstating "easily" here by quite a bit: name ONE consumer retail store or site that carries them. Best you could hope for is retail sites that allow third party sellers like Amazon or shit like Ebay.

[wadeak78]

@TheRandomness

4 minutes ago, deXxterlab97 said:

Why not? 

It has to do with power delivery and the way it's been implemented to prevent throttling.

Source: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/asrock-z270m-stx-mxm-micro-stx-motherboard-pictured.1310/

if you scroll down a bit it's in the long post by 3lfk1ng

[TheRandomness]

23 minutes ago, wadeak78 said:

@TheRandomness

It has to do with power delivery and the way it's been implemented to prevent throttling.

Source: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/asrock-z270m-stx-mxm-micro-stx-motherboard-pictured.1310/

if you scroll down a bit it's in the long post by 3lfk1ng

But will that stop people from trying?

24 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

1) Usually either really expensive workstation ones or crap Laptop ones

 

2) I think you're overstating "easily" here by quite a bit: name ONE consumer retail store or site that carries them. Best you could hope for is retail sites that allow third party sellers like Amazon or shit like Ebay.

Places like taobao and aliexpress are quite cool

[Misanthrope]

1 hour ago, TheRandomness said:

Places like taobao and aliexpress are quite cool

That's not the question. The question is are this cards commonplace? They're not, there's not even standard cooling solutions its just not practical for consumers to buy MXM cards even if technically possible through Grey area resellers. 

[JAKEBAB]

This is awesome. Asrock should sell or offer an easy solution to obtain mxm but even they dont u have thunderbolt 3 so no real problem.

[NumLock21]

Don't bother with mxm its almost next to impossible to find one and it's been like this for 8 years. Nothing has changed.