A giant wave of Z490 motherboards flooded headlines yesterday, accompanying Intel's 10th Generation Comet Lake-S CPU launch. It's no wonder that motherboards, such as the Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR, went unnoticed. But as spotted by hardware detective @KOMACHI_ENSAKA, ASRock's Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR comes with Intel's ATX12VO power connector.
ASRock didn't touch the 8-pin EPS power connector. Although the motherboard manufacturer has sacrificed the 24-pin power connector, there are still a bunch of components that still depend on the 5V rail, and a handful need 3.3V. As such, ASRock placed two 4-pin power connectors on the top right corner of the motherboard that should be used to power SATA drives.
There's also a 6-pin PCIe power connector, which we suspect is there to feed graphics cards in a multi-GPU setup.
Besides the ATX12VO power connector, the Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR has a modest featureset. The ATX motherboard features the LGA1200 CPU socket and is based on the high-end Z490 chipset. It's sporting a 10-phase power delivery subsystem and four conventional DDR4 RAM slots. The maximum supported capacity is 128GB with memory speeds surpassing DDR4-4400.
For storage, the motherboard provides four SATA III ports and a M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 port that supports M.2 drives with a length up to 110mm, whether they're SATA or PCIe-based. The board isn't PCIe 4.0-ready and comes with two PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. There are also three PCIe 3.0 x 1 slots and an M.2 socket housing a Wi-Fi 802.11ac module with Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity.
The motherboard's rear panel exposes one PS/2 combo port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, one USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A port and one USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports. Two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 headers are situated on the motherboard as well. There's just a single HDMI 1.4 port for video ouput.
A standard Gigabit Ethernet port, which is based of Intel's I219V controller, provides wired access to the internet. On the audio side, Realtek's ALC1200 audio codec offers 7.1-channel audio through the trio of 3.5mm audio jacks.
ASRock didn't reveal the pricing or exact release date for its Intel 400-series motherboards, but we expect the new products to hit the shelves in the coming weeks.
