Installation
Installation can be quite tricky especially with a Mini-ITX motherboard. Everything is so tight with very little wigggle room, so make sure you use a chassis with plenty of room. For our test rig, we used an open chassis. For cooling, we used an Enermax AquaFusion 120 AIO cooler fitted with their LGA1700 mounting kit. It fitted perfectly with plenty of space around the processor socket.
BIOS
The BIOS on the ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 was surprisingly to use, and has a distinctive “Phantom Gaming Red” look and feel to it. The 1st page you’ll see the default “Easy Mode” where you can monitor all the system status on one page. During our tests, we left everything on AUTO/Default, however I did enable XMP 3.0 profiles for the memory supporting DDR5-6000 ram.
The advanced tab allows users to configure settings for CPU, voltages, chipset, storage and NVMe, as well as onboard devices such as Thunderbolt, USB, TPM and more. There’s also a page for hardware monitoring, security and boot preferences.
