Final Thoughts
I’ve always been a fan of mini-ITX motherboards, they give you the ability to build an incredibly small, yet powerful system. The thing you always have to worry about with these small boards is will they give me all of the features I want compared to a larger motherboard. With the ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4 you are getting all of those features plus more! For starters, even though we have a smaller board we still have an adequate VRM design for high-end CPUs and cooling to back it up as well. We did not run into any issues running a Core i9 processor on this board and our VRM temperatures were fine.
When it comes to a Z790-based motherboard you are going to get pretty much everything you would want. You get PCI-Express 5.0 on your graphics card, three PCI-Express 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, DDR5 support, Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 gen 2×2, and WiFi 6E. If you think about that you could load this board out with three M.2 drives and not even have to worry about space in your SFF (small form factor) build for 2.5-inch drives. This again will allow for some really small builds!
ASRock’s BIOS is very easy to navigate and their Easy Mode makes things a lot less daunting for first-time builders. I do like that ASRock does have motherboard companion software, but at this point it does feel a bit dated.
If anything is missing from this board it would be PCI-Express 5.0 storage, but considering the heat and massive heatsinks you need to keep those drives cool it makes sense to just go with all Gen4 storage on this board.
At the end of the day if you are looking for a solid Intel Z790 mini-ITX motherboard this is it! Right now you can pick this board up at our favorite online retailer for $390.93. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4 Motherboard a 9 out of 10 score!
Pros:
– Solid performance
– Thunderbolt 4
– USB 3.2 Gen 2×2
– Three M.2 slots
– Reinforced DDR5 and PCI-Express slots
– Great BIOS
Cons:
– No Gen5 storage
– Software seems dated
