ASRock announced five new motherboards with embedded Apollo Lake SoCs, all of which use passive cooling to keep your system completely silent.
Intel’s manufactures its Apollo Lake SoCs on its 14nm tri-gate process with the new Goldmont microarchitecture. Compared to the preceding Braswell SoCs, Apollo Lake desktop SoCs have a higher 10W TDP that should help them maintain boost frequencies for longer periods of time. Apollo Lake also has an updated Gen9 graphics core based on Skylake’s iGPU.
As we mentioned above, ASRock uses passive cooling with all of the SoCs. The cooling solution should be sufficient for these low-power processors, but it may limit performance somewhat as the CPU will throttle once it reaches a certain temperature.
Although Apollo Lake supports DDR4 memory, ASRock opted to use DDR3 RAM on all five of its motherboards. This won’t affect CPU performance much, but it will hamper the performance of the iGPU somewhat.
ASRock designed three of the motherboards around the mini-ITX form factor and used SO-DIMM RAM to conserve space.
The fastest of these new boards is the ASRock Super Alloy J4205-ITX, which uses the Pentium J4205 SoC. The J4205 is clocked slightly higher than other Apollo Lake SKUs and has a beefier iGPU with more EUs.
There is currently no word on pricing or availability.
| Asrock’s Apollo Lake Motherboards | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | ASRock Super Alloy J3355M | ASRock Super Alloy J3355B-ITX | ASRock Super Alloy J3455-ITX | ASRock Super Alloy J3455-ITX | ASRock Super Alloy J4205-ITX |
| Form Factor | Micro-ATX | Mini-ITX | Mini-ITX | Micro-ATX | Mini-ITX |
| SoC | Apollo Lake Celeron J3355 | Apollo Lake Celeron J3355 | Apollo Lake Celeron J3455 | Apollo Lake Celeron J3455 | Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 |
| Core Count | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Clock Speed | 2GHz / 2.5GHz Boost | 2GHz / 2.5GHz Boost | 1.5GHz / 2.3GHz Boost | 1.5GHz / 2.3GHz Boost | 1.5GHz / 2.6GHz Boost |
| iGPU | HD Graphics 500 (12 EUs) | HD Graphics 500 (12 EUs) | HD Graphics 500 (12 EUs) | HD Graphics 500 (12 EUs) | HD Graphics 505 (16 EUs) |
| TDP | 10W | 10W | 10W | 10W | 10W |
| Memory Support | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz DIMM | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz SO-DIMM | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz SO-DIMM | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz DIMM | Up To 2 x 8GB DDR3 1866MHz SO-DIMM |
| Expansion Slots | PCI-E 2.0 x162 x PCI-E 2.0 x1 | PCI-E 2.0 x16 | PCI-E 2.0 x1M.2 Key E | PCI-E 2.0 x162 x PCI-E 2.0 x1 | PCI-E 2.0 x1M.2 Key E |
| Storage | 2 x SATA-III (6Gbps) | 2 x SATA-III (6Gbps) | 4 x SATA-III (6Gbps)(Two Controlled By Asmedia ASM1061 Controller) | 2 x SATA-III (6Gbps) | 4 x SATA-III (6Gbps)(Two Controlled By Asmedia ASM1061 Controller) |
| LAN | Realtek RTL8111E | Realtek RTL8111GR | Realtek RTL8111GR | Realtek RTL8111E | Realtek RTL8111GR |
| Audio | Realtek ALC887 | Realtek ALC887 | Realtek ALC892 | Realtek ALC887 | Realtek ALC892 |
| USB | 4 x USB 3.0 (2 on Rear I/O)7 x USB 2.0 (2 on Rear I/O) | 5 x USB 3.0 (3 on Rear I/O)5 x USB 2.0 (1 on Rear I/O) | 4 x USB 3.0 (2 on Rear I/O)5 x USB 2.0 (2 on Rear I/O) | 4 x USB 3.0 (2 on Rear I/O)7 x USB 2.0 (2 on Rear I/O) | 5 x USB 3.0 (2 on Rear I/O)5 x USB 2.0 (2 on Rear I/O) |