ASRock Industrial Computer has taken the veils off the new lineup of Mini-STX motherboards that are powered by Intel's 11th Generation Tiger Lake chips.
The STX-1500 comes in a Mini-STX form factor, meaning the motherboard measures 5.5 x 5.8 inches. ASRock sells the motherboard in three flavors. The STX-1500P is outfitted with the Core i7-1185G7E, while the STX-1500M and STX-1500V are based of the Core i5-1145G7E and Core i3-1115G4E, respectively. Regardless of SKU, all three chips operate withing the 28W envelope.
ASRock equips the STX-1500 with two SO-DIMM DDR4 memory slots. Due to the limited landscape, one slot is situated on the front of the motherboard and the other slot is hidden at the back. The motherboard officially supports DDR4-3200 memory modules and up to 64GB of memory.
The STX-1500 provides one M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 slot and two SATA III ports for connecting you storage devices. The M.2 slot accepts drives up to 80mm whether they be PCIe-or SATA-based.
The motherboard comes equipped with one 2.5G Gigabit Ethernet port and one standard Gigabit Ethernet port. However, the controller combination varies from model to model. The STX-1500P and STX-1500M leverage the Intel I225LM and I219LM controllers, while the STX-1500V employs the Intel I225LM and I219V controllers.
The front I/O consists of one USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI 2.0a port and two 3.5mm audio jacks. The Realtek ALC897 audio codec is present to take care of audio tasks. The rear I/O, on the other hand, houses three HDMI 2.0a ports, the two aforementioned Ethernet ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, two USB 3.0 ports and the DC jack.
The STX-1500 supports up to four displays simultaneously. Obviously, the Tiger Lake's iGPU will do all the heavy graphical lifting. The HDMI 2.0a ports do resolutions up to 4096 x 1200 at 60 Hz. The LVDS connector supports 1920 x 1200 at 60 Hz and the eDP maxes out at 4096 x 2304 at 60Hz.
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For expansion, the motherboard provides on M.2 Key-E slot for wireless cards and one M.2 Key-B slot that's connected to the SIM socket. Some of the other internal headers include one USB 2.0 header, two COM ports, four GPI connectors, four GPO connectors and a TPM 2.0 header.
ASRock didn't disclose the pricing or availability for the STX-1500 motherboards.
Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.