Motherboard Incoming AM4 Mini-ITX boards

stree

Airflow Optimizer
Dec 10, 2016
307
177
OK:

The ASR board has no USB3.1 at all. The Biostar has 2x 3.1gen2 and also 3.1 gen 1
The ASR has 8 phase VRM..............But.the same controller as its 350 sister, the ISL95712, which incidentally splits the VRMs so 3 phase is doubled to 6 phase for the V-core and then 2 phase for SoC............so not as potent as it may appear at first glance.
The Biostar is 7 phase, using the same controller, but uses this set up on all its boards, as you will see if you read the link I sent.
The setup ASR use is similar or same as MSI used on its Krait boards which ended badly.
I do not own nor ever have owned, any Biostar product, in fact I do not own any AM4 board yet.still waiting for the"right" ITX iteration to appear.
I see no reason why the Biostar board should not be listed along with the others available, they all have their own flaws and shortcomings, Unless this is just based on your personal preferences in which case I misunderstood the nature of the initial posting.
 
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ondert

Airflow Optimizer
Apr 16, 2017
340
161
Do you see "enough" differences to change Biostar mobo to Asrock or Gigabyte one? By the way, Biostar released a bios update last week.
 

Pelican

Average Stuffer
May 23, 2017
66
65
I think his opinion is valid, I personally also don't see the use of metal-reinforced PCIe slots (in SFF cases), don't really need LED lighting or Wi-Fi. You're making a list solely on what you think is the best choices out there. But not everyone will have all those options available or dislikes any of the other brands for whatever reason.

I didn't say the opinion was invalid, I said it was not important to the point I was making: a person who does not need X may as well buy the board with X if they both cost the same and otherwise have a similar quality of components. Is there something controversial about this? I agree that metal reinforcement of PCIe slots is probably not necessary, but it still demonstrates extra attention to detail.

Disliking a board because of brand loyalty is not relevant. Being unable to find a supplier for a board also says nothing about the board itself.

On a side note, I don't understand why you are claiming my list is subjective and based on what I personally "think is the best". The structure of the list only comments on the unique differences between the boards and a possible use case. It literally does not say which one is best, and I've already made a point of saying there is no winner. Can you please quote what part of that list is subjective so I can fix it?


Do you see "enough" differences to change Biostar mobo to Asrock or Gigabyte one? By the way, Biostar released a bios update last week.

Assuming the Biostar board does what you want, I personally wouldn't.


OK:
The ASR board has no USB3.1 at all. The Biostar has 2x 3.1gen2 and also 3.1 gen 1
The ASR has 8 phase VRM..............But.the same controller as its 350 sister, the ISL95712, which incidentally splits the VRMs so 3 phase is doubled to 6 phase for the V-core and then 2 phase for SoC............so not as potent as it may appear at first glance.
The Biostar is 7 phase, using the same controller, but uses this set up on all its boards, as you will see if you read the link I sent.
The setup ASR use is similar or same as MSI used on its Krait boards which ended badly.
I do not own nor ever have owned, any Biostar product, in fact I do not own any AM4 board yet.still waiting for the"right" ITX iteration to appear.
I see no reason why the Biostar board should not be listed along with the others available, they all have their own flaws and shortcomings, Unless this is just based on your personal preferences in which case I misunderstood the nature of the initial posting.

So the layout of the Biostar board is better for ultra small builds, and it is also the only ITX X370 board to support USB 3.1 at the moment? I'll add that in.

Is the VRM difference significant in real world use? I don't know a lot about what difference that makes, so it would be good if you could elaborate in simple terms for me. What I do know is that the HardwareCanucks review says the VRM temps get way too warm on the Biostar board. They said that the board gets very "toasty" when overclocking an 8 core Ryzen CPU, and that a 4.1GHz at 1.40V overclock was too hot to be "safe" for a 24/7 system on this mobo. They recommended not using it to overclock Ryzen 7, and tell Ryzen 5 owners to be "cautious". For that reason they say this board is not suited to the enthusiast crowd.

I don't know a lot about how the Gigabyte or ASRock boards are performing in terms of Ryzen 7 temps, so it would be good to know if this is a problem with the Biostar board or if the AM4 ITX boards are all warm. I think there has been some discussion about the heat of the Gigabyte board already, but I don't know the details.
 
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jeshikat

Jessica. Wayward SFF.n Founder
Silver Supporter
Feb 22, 2015
4,969
4,780
All am4 itx boards support usb 3.1 gen 1 as the usb 3.0 spec has been asorbed by it and is no longer used.

I hate that spec change so much, it's incredibly anti-consumer since some companies make a habit of neglecting to mention the gen now. Generally I still call it USB 3.0 and USB 3.1 to differentiate them.
 

VegetableStu

Shrink Ray Wielder
Aug 18, 2016
1,949
2,619
I'd be okay with USB 5Gbps and USB 10Gbps actually. Like what they did to SATA 3G when they found out SATA 2 was 3Gbps (They're mostly printed as SATA 6G on the spec sheets and boards now)
 

rokabeka

network packet manipulator
Jul 9, 2016
248
268
I currently have both the Biostar X370GTN and the Asrock AB350.

The BIOS of the two boards is also night and day... Asrock provides a simple to use, well laid out BIOS. While the Biostar BIOS is one of the worst I have used in the last 5 years. Even the fan control is confusing.

still no sign of pcie bifurcation on Biostar?
 

Ares

Minimal Tinkerer
Aug 16, 2017
4
2
Any news from Asus and MSI's camps as to if they are planning release their own mini-ITX AM4 motherboards?
 

|||

King of Cable Management
Sep 26, 2015
775
759
Do they mean by threadripper itx?

No, he was saying there was no chance for a Threadripper ITX because even though not all of the data pins are used with the socket it shares with Epyc, all of the power pins are. Managing all of those traces on an ITX board would make it prohibitively thick.

I was simply referring to the Threadripper boards that are in the existing product pipelines, which are most likely ATX and E-ATX.
 
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Mar 6, 2017
501
454
No, he was saying there was no chance for a Threadripper ITX because even though not all of the data pins are used with the socket it shares with Epyc, all of the power pins are. Managing all of those traces on an ITX board would make it prohibitively thick.

I was simply referring to the Threadripper boards that are in the existing product pipelines, which are most likely ATX and E-ATX.

I like my boards thicc