Verdict and Conclusion
Have you ever seen all those impressive PC systems, from Case Mod competition hosted by Cooler Master or Thermaltake? Well, if you haven’t … then you’re in for a treat. The most impressive case mods in these competition are “scratch builds”, meaning they don’t use a regular PC case or chassis. Instead they’re built from the ground up, using all sorts of materials including 3D printed parts. And one thing you’ll often find in the center of all these scratch builds, is a mini-ITX motherboard. Why? well the answer is quite simple. Its compact size allow modders to easily build their design around it … and the results are often mind-blowing!
This is one of the reasons why I love mini-ITX motherboards so much. They’re small and compact, yet pack a powerful punch in terms of performance and features. High performance mini-ITX motherboards can be expensive, but thanks to ASRock they’ve released the Phantom Gaming B860i Lightning Wi-Fi motherboard, which uses the Intel’s maintream B860 chipset. It’s one of the smallest B860 motherboard on the market, measuring just 17.0 x 17.0cm.
Using the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K for our tests, along with 32GB of DDR5-7600 ram and a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, we managed to get some impressive scores in all of our benchmarks, including a Cinebench 2024 score of 2,494 points for multi core, and 146 points for single core. For PCMark 10 and PassMark 11, we got very good scores of 10,476 and 17,429 respectively.
For Procyon Video Editing Benchmark, we got a score of 11,320 and a score of 231 for the AI Computer Vision Benchmark. For 3DMark Steel Nomad and Speedway, we got excellent scores of 6,728 and 7,591 respectively. And finally, for Port Royal and Timespy, we got an amazng score of 18,712 and 27,175 respectively.
When it comes to features, don’t be detered by its size. This tiny motherboard features a 10+1+1 Power Phase Design with and impressive 110A Dr.MOS for VCore+GT+SA, giving you smooth power delivery and stability. All of this is cooled by composite VRM heatsinks combining a cooling fan, a heat-pipe, and several large Aluminium heatsinks for efficient heat dissipation
Because of its size, it only comes with 2 x DDR5 DIMM slots. However, it comes with ASRock’s Memory OC shield, and supports both Intel XMP and AMD EXPO memory modules, with speeds of up to DDR5-9333+ (OC)
Again, the size of the board limits its expansion capabilities with only 1 x PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for next-gen graphic cards, but you get plenty of storage options. These include 3 x SATA ports, 1 x Blazing M.2 (PCIe Gen5x4) and 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4) slot on the back of the motherboard.
Believe it or not, this tiny motherboard offers plenty of connectivity with total of 12 x USB ports, 1 x Thunderbolt™ 4 Type-C port, a 2.5G LAN, Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth. Other features include the 7.1 HD Nahimic Audio, HDMI output, BIOS Flashback button, ASRock’s Polychrome RGB and support for SignalRGB.
You’re probably wondering … why not get the mini-ITX version of the Z890 (enthusiast chipset). Well, since the ASRock Phantom Gaming B860i Lightning WiFi is a mini-ITX motherboard, there are no extra PCIE slots and thus I wouldn’t need all those extra PCIE lanes offered by the Z890 chipset. The B860 chipset will do just fine, plus it’s a lot more affordable.
You can buy the ASRock Phantom Gaming B860i Lightning WiFi motherboard for around USD $219 from Newegg – https://tinyurl.com/2md5uys4
Final Words:
If you’re in the market for an affordable mini-ITX motherboard that’s compatible with the Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) processors, then take a look at the ASRock Phantom Gaming B860i Lightning WiFi. It’s compact in size, yet packs a powerful punch in terms of performance and features.
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