Pros: I've been thinking about building a low power PC for a while now. The problem is I need 2 SSD's and 1 hard drive in my machine. Most of the boards I looked at the hard drive was going to be a problem. This was the board that I realized would work for me. To get the second SSD I used the PCIe 3.0 x2 slot. I used a Sabrent SSD to PCIe adapter card. I did testing with Crystal Disk Mark and the SSD is using both PCIe lanes based on my speed testing. I have included a picture of my Crystal Disk Mark run and a chart of different PCIe versions and lane speeds.

Cons: I tried to enable XMP on this board and it won't boot. I figured out why. The highest DRAM voltage for this board is 1.26V. My memory needs 1.35V. There are only two BIOSes for this board. The original 1.10 BIOS that the board shipped with and a 2.01 Beta BIOS. The 2.01 Beta BIOS includes the patch for the LogoFail vulnerability, so I wanted that and did update to that BIOS. I really hate the idea of updating to a Beta BIOS. But, ASRock must be testing the hell out of that BIOS since it has been in Beta since 10/21/2024. Being serious the support on this board isn't great. Drivers are pretty old also. I haven't played with getting the Wi-Fi to work. The Wi-Fi slot on the board is Intel® CNVio/CNVio2. As far as I can tell that means the best you can do is put a Wi-Fi 6 card in the onboard slot. The Intel Wi-Fi 7 cards seem to use CNVio3, so they won't work on this board. I am going to leave the PCIe 3.0 x1 slot open for now, so it could take a Wi-Fi card in the future. I decided to go with a DAC for this build since no way am I using the onboard ALC 897 audio. That saves me needing a slot for a sound card. If you like RGB it doesn't have the ARGB ports, so you'll need to buy a controller, not a hub, to get RGB with this board. Only two fan headers if I remember right.

Overall Review: The board has some limitations, but it is a low power board, not a performance gaming board. I'm guessing when I'm finished I'll cut my power usage by around 100W. I am still in testing with the board as of 1/11/2026, but so far I do really like it and would recommend it. I'm going with 4 Eggs instead of 5 because of the 1.26V memory limitation, the not so great BIOS and driver support, and the CNVio2 Wi-Fi slot.