For whom it may concern: New Deskmini GTX 1060 appears to be a Windows 10 only machine

[whum]

My title is a bit misleading, but I will explain.

I was looking around and found the Asrock drivers and noticed only windows 10 on their website.

Now, most people will be fine with this, especially considering you'll want Win 10 to take advantage of the Direct X support on this. But I wanted to point this out in the case that you are in the 1% of people who want this machine but do NOT want to use Windows 10 exclusively. Most other essential drivers install fine on older windows, but you will be without the nvidia MXM drivers, which sort of makes this entire model useless if you forego the DGPU. I see the likelihood of any linux drivers coming from them as low, but never say never. And I know the linux community will do that on their own if the interest is there.

I contacted Asrock over this and an Asrock rep confirmed this morning that the unit supports Windows 10 only. I was on the fence about buying this device, but now I am going to pass, just because of my specific OS needs. But I want to put this out for anybody who is the same.

I don't blame Asrock for doing this in the slightest. It's silly probably for them to worry about even Windows 8.1, but I was still holding out hope I could get around using Windows 10 on this.

Anyway, I'm going to assume that given the board's specific design for power delivery to the mxm, looking for the appropriate driver elsewhere would be a bad idea. BUT I'm not well-read on that issue, and if anybody wants to advise on that, please do so Cheers!

 

[AleksandarK]

Personally, i like W10 and i am using it right now. Just like you said, the machine needed to use it for two reasons:
1. KabyLake doesnt support W7, which much more people use than W8.1 . I dont think anyone cares about 8.1 these days.
2. As you pointed out, MXM drivers

Plus W10 user base is growing and many games will begin to drop support for W7, so people will need to start upgrading at some point; 99% of the people who build new Windows PC install W10.

 

[Soul_Est]

My title is a bit misleading, but I will explain.

I was looking around and found the Asrock drivers and noticed only windows 10 on their website.

Now, most people will be fine with this, especially considering you'll want Win 10 to take advantage of the Direct X support on this. But I wanted to point this out in the case that you are in the 1% of people who want this machine but do NOT want to use Windows 10 exclusively. Most other essential drivers install fine on older windows, but you will be without the nvidia MXM drivers, which sort of makes this entire model useless if you forego the DGPU. I see the likelihood of any linux drivers coming from them as low, but never say never. And I know the linux community will do that on their own if the interest is there.

I contacted Asrock over this and an Asrock rep confirmed this morning that the unit supports Windows 10 only. I was on the fence about buying this device, but now I am going to pass, just because of my specific OS needs. But I want to put this out for anybody who is the same.

I don't blame Asrock for doing this in the slightest. It's silly probably for them to worry about even Windows 8.1, but I was still holding out hope I could get around using Windows 10 on this.

Anyway, I'm going to assume that given the board's specific design for power delivery to the mxm, looking for the appropriate driver elsewhere would be a bad idea. BUT I'm not well-read on that issue, and if anybody wants to advise on that, please do so Cheers!

You cannot just say that the open source community will take care of themselves on this as NVidia's drivers are fully proprietary unlike AMD's. The Nouveau driver does not count as it is a reverse engineering project.

 

[whum]

You cannot just say that the open source community will take care of themselves on this as NVidia's drivers are fully proprietary unlike AMD's. The Nouveau driver does not count as it is a reverse engineering project.

All I meant was that the linux community would bug Asrock or Nvidia on their own if enough linux users want those drivers for linux. I'm not familiar with linux, just throwing that in there.

 

[lhl]

That's disappointing to hear - I dropped them a line asking about Linux support, although because Nvidia makes unified drivers, honestly, I suspect it might just work OOTB - I had an old Gigabyte Brix 760 that had an MXM Nvidia GTX 760 and that had no problems being detected and running w/ the Nvidia drivers.

 

[changguangyu]

Where can i buy the board, not the whole barebone?

 

[Kmpkt]

Directly from AsRock I believe. You can buy cards directly from Aetina (nVidia) and TUL/Powercolor (AMD). In channel you will only be able to buy the B250 version of the motherboard in the full deskmini configuration.