MSI H510 Mini-ITX Motherboards Arrive to Tempt SFF Builders

MSI H510TI-S03
MSI H510TI-S03 (Image credit: MSI)

MSI has launched a trio of H510 mini-ITX motherboards (via momomo_us) to house Intel's latest Rocket Lake and Comet Lake processors. While the motherboards are oriented towards business users, they offer the a rich feature set for the average person as well.

The H510TI-S01, H510TI-S03 and H510TI-S05 carry the LGA1200 socket and are based on Intel's H510 chipset. Unlike your standard mini-ITX offering, MSI's motherboards don't require a 24-pin power connector. They function on a DC-in connector and a standard 4-pin power connector. 

According to MSI, the motherboards support Rocket Lake-S chips up to the Core i9 tier, although the company didn't specify the TDP envelope. The CPU compatibility list wasn't available at the time of the article. However, logic suggests that the H510TI-S01, H510TI-S03 and H510TI-S05 may not support the more power hungry chips due to the modest power layout and power delivery subsystem.

The H510TI-S01, H510TI-S03 and H510TI-S05 are equipped with two DDR4 SO-DIMM memory slots. There is native support for up to 64GB of memory, but frequency varies, depending on the processor. Comet Lake is limited to DDR4-2933 speeds, while Rocket Lake can leverage DDR4-3200 memory modules.

Regardless of the model, you get two conventional SATA III ports and M.2 2280 slot that confirms to the PCIe 3.0 x4 specification for storage. There is no PCIe expansion slot on either of the motherboards. This means that your processor's iGPU will have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to graphical workloads. This is also where the motherboards start to differentiate themselves from each other. The H510TI-S01 and H510TI-S03 only supply a HDMI 2.0b port and LVDS output, while the H510TI-S05 offers an additional DisplayPort 1.4 output.

MSI equipped the H510TI-S01 with four USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and five USB 2.0 ports, all based on the H510 chipset. The H510TI-S03, on the other hand, arrives with two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and five USB 2.0 ports from the H510 chipset and two extra USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports from a third-party ASMedia ASM3142 controller. The H510TI-S05 mirrors the H510TI-S03 but provide a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-C port via an internal header and switches the ASMedia ASM3142 controller for the ASM1074. The motherboards also sports two USB 2.0 headers for four supplementary USB 2.0 ports.

The motherboards' other attributes are the same. Each model utilizes Realtek's ALC897 codec for audio and RTL8111H LAN controller for a Gigabit Ethernet connection. One M.2 E-key slot is available to add a wireless module.

MSI hasn't revealed the availability or pricing for the H510TI-S01, H510TI-S03 and H510TI-S05.

Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • watzupken
    It is not tempting at all to be honest. Low power and Intel processor don't go hand in hand. Unless of course if you don't mind a steep penalty to performance since Intel chips need to run at very high clockspeed to deliver competitive performance. Further more, I really doubt this will be that cheap. I've been hunting for a decent B560 ITX board, but not been able to find one don't cost too much.
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