14 DAY TRIAL // Without much fanfare, ASRock has just made public its latest motherboard that will hold a "Skylake"-compatible Z170 derivate chipset, the B150, for mini-PCs.
The new ASRock B150M Combo-G mainboard will hold both DDR3 and DDR4 memory slots, allowing users to build powerful PCs in a micro-ATX form factor. It features a lot of new internal upgrades compared to the previous Z77 and H77 chipsets for mini-ITXs, like high-density glass fabric printed circuit board and six-phase digital voltage regulator module with high-quality solid-state inductors.
Although it arrives with the same LGA 1151 socket, the new board does not support overclocking of CPUs, since the only chipset that allows that at the moment is the Z170 from Intel, which is specially built for the Skylake-K series.
Another curious thing that really shows the hybrid nature of this board is that DDR3/DDR3L and DDR4 memory modules do not work simultaneously. This isn't something completely out of the ordinary, since each module generation has different pins and drastically different latency numbers that simply cannot work with each other.
ASRock B150M is the bare minimum for your potential Skylake CPU
The ASRock B150M Combo-G mainboard comes with PCI Express x16 slots, one PCI Express x1 slot, six Serial ATA-6Gb/s ports, one SATA Express port, six USB 3.0 connectors, Intel Gigabit Ethernet controller, and 7.1-channel audio based on the ALC887 audio codec with ELNA audio caps. It does not, however, come with USB 3.1 Type-C ports or DisplayPorts.
Right now, there isn't any pricing information available, nor is the card available worldwide, but it will probably come at a very affordable price since it doesn't have all the features a full Z170 "Skylake" chipset has and it does sacrifice DDR4 slot availability by offering a stop-gap combo for budget gamers.
So, in short, if you plan to buy a new Skylake CPU and don't want to spend precious money on new DDR4 modules, this might be the perfect solution for you, but it will become very much limited in a year or two, when the DDR4 memories become standard and B150M will have 2 unusable slots thanks to their DDR3 design.
