Respect to ASRock, it doesn't get any better for an SFF enthusiast than getting the news about this board. My X99E-ITX/ac is my favorite piece of tech that I own (and one of my favorite things that I own, period) and a veritable engineering miracle. And this board seems to have outdone it in nearly every way.
I won't repeat all the praise that's already been given on the major improvements. A few smaller points - I am really glad they relocated the 24-pin. It was a pain to connect the included 24-pin cable of the Corsair SF600 to the X99E-ITX/ac in my NCase M1. It barely reached and had to stretch it diagonally across the board. The new placement will allow for much cleaner cable management. Also, I am really happy that they went with rigidly mounted Wi-Fi connectors. I hate the I/O shield-mounted connections on my X99E-ITX/ac, they get loose over time. So kudos on fixing that. And the board has one more power phase compared to the previous iteration -- not sure if that was really needed as 6-phase was already all you needed for maximum OC, but it can't hurt.
Question - Will this board come with an onboard headphone amp like the previous one? I use mine to drive my Sennheisers, saved me from having to buy an external DAC. I hope they kept this feature.
Question 2 - Does this board still come with 3 fan headers? Where are they? One major flaw of the previous board was that one of the headers was under the PCIe slot.
On aesthetics - I weirdly think it looks slightly worse. I liked the light blue theme of the previous iteration, it was a nice, soothing color. I actually made my system's entire color scheme light blue because of it. This one is very dark and Darth Vader-y. But I guess it's neutral which is good. It would be nice if they used a nicer font for all the text on the PCBs rather than this Arial or whatever it is, but I guess that's nitpicking. I also think there are pros and cons to having 4 SODIMM slots. Yes, you get quad-channel memory, but you have to deal with SODIMM's limitations. Unless you use very specific applications whose performance actually scales with memory bandwidth -- and I think that is a small minority of people -- it makes no difference. But I think overall, it's better to have the option.
