CeBIT 2013: Mini-ITX Gaming Computer Released by ASRock

Last week, the CeBIT 2013 trade show was held in Hannover, Germany, and ASRock was just one of the companies that attended and revealed new products. We've already seen the motherboards, so now we are looking at a mini personal computer.

For those who have missed our report, the company brought two Haswell-ready platforms to the show: Z87-Extreme6 and B85M. We have covered them here.

Neither of those two platforms was small enough to fit in the form factor that the company sought when it made the SFF computer in the photos on the left (provided by Lab501.ro).

As such, ASRock made a different mainboard for it, called Z87-E ITX but packed with more features than many models of its size.

It has a 6-phase VRM, for example, while the LGA 1150 CPU socket is wired to two DDR3 DIMM slots and a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot.

A mini PCI Express 2.0 slot is available as well, and has a special purpose: to receive the WLAN+Bluetooth card that ASRock included in the base design.

SIX SATA 6 Gbps ports are available. A fairly large number for a system that doesn't have much room inside for storage drives. Still, at least one can be reassigned as eSATA.

Moving on, the Z87-E ITX has HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI video outputs, PS/2 mouse/keyboard combo port, Gigabit Ethernet, and 8-channel HD audio with TOSLINK digital output.

The three video connectors will be useful in case the Luci Virtu technology is used (the display gets plugged in the motherboard but the add-in card, if present, is harnessed as well).

The motherboard, wireless connectivity board and small video card (bought separately by customers) are housed in a small form factor case co-developed with BWM Design. It uses a PCI Express Riser (lets video boards be installed parallel to the mainboard, so they don't need to be weak, low profile ones).

Sadly, ASRock did not provide a price or availability date for the system.