A slightly “twisted” solution for a motherboard incredibly rich considering its tiny size.
At the release of the X670 chipset, AMD had surprised its world with a product in two separate chips. On the contrary, the B650 – a less top-of-the-range solution – is content with a single component. It is therefore not surprising to note the absence of mini-ITX motherboards based on X670… Well, until the arrival of this surprising ASUS ROG Strix X670-I.
Mini-ITX and X670 chipset
The Taiwanese company has been promoting its compact motherboard for several months now, but we still haven’t been able to find out how ASUS managed to fit such a large chipset into such a small motherboard.
Thanks to the work of Uniko Hardware, relayed by Videocardz, it is now possible. The site was actually able to get its hands on a copy of the ASUS motherboard and did not hesitate to reverse engineer it so that we could see the solution adopted in more detail.
A solution which therefore takes the form of a daughter card plugged in vertically, on a slot placed between socket AM5 of the processor and the single PCI Express port, an x16 provided for the graphics card.
A “sandwich” of heatsinks
ASUS has done it pretty well with a relatively complex assembly to frame this daughterboard that reveals a minimalist PCB. As you can see in the photo, it boils down, so to speak, to the only second chip of the X670 chipset.
We note all the same the presence of a slot “pull-out”, which allows to connect an NVMe SSD in M.2 format. The assembly is caught in a kind of gangue composed of three heat dissipation plates which also includes a second M.2 connected to the motherboard. ASUS can thus offer a PCIe Gen 4 SSD and a second in Gen 5.
Uniko Hardware will soon publish its complete test of the ASUS ROG Strix X670-I motherboard and we will see if our colleagues have taken the opportunity to try to start the beast without this daughter card. Would it then lose the X670 specificities to behave as a B650?
Source : Uniko-Hardware, Videocardz
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