ASRock clearly sees a market for mini-ITX gaming computers and has shown off its mini-ITX system that will be based on Intel's upcoming Haswell chip. The system's eye-catching enclosure was designed in collaboration with BMW design and was kept sleek through the use of a PCIe riser that allows the GeForce GTX 680 GPU to be mounted horizontally rather than vertically.
The system features the impressively well equipped Z87E-ITX motherboard which uses a 6-phase VRM to give the LGA1150 CPU its juice and includes two DDR3 memory slots, a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot and a mini PCIe 2.0 slot in which rests the WiFi and Bluetooth card. Connectivity is handled through six SATA3 ports, one eSATA port (at the cost of one SATA3 port), six USB 3.0 ports (four on the rear I/O, two through the front I/O header), 7.1 audio with Optical TOSLINK, Gigabit Ethernet and a PS/2 port.
The system will utilize Lucid Virtu's graphics switching software which enables both the on-die HD 4600 Intel Graphics and GTX 680 to be outputted through the system's HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI ports.
Although we can expect the system to come to market around Haswell's launch, we still have no information on its options, pricing and regional availability.
