It has been a long time since we have seen interesting passive motherboards, and the new ASRock N100DC-ITX and N100M come to fill that gap.
These new passive motherboards from ASRock offers Intel Alder Lake-N processors, 12th generation Intel N100 with very low power consumption. With this hardware it is possible to mount as we see an aluminum radiator to run the system without fans, avoiding noise and mechanical problems in environments that require it.
In addition, this new processor offers AV1 video decoding. If you want to see how the Intel N100 performs you can see our review of similar hardware. A processor enough to run Windows 11 or Linux with desktop or multimedia apps.
ASRock N100DC-ITX and N100M Specifications
The new ASRock N100 boards feature new generation Intel N100 Alder Lake-N manufactured in 10 nm (Intel 7) that offers appealing performance improvements with a consumption of only 6W TPD. This Intel N100 processor has 4 cores + 4 threads and offers a speed between 2.9 and 3.4 GHz.
On the graphics side, we have a 24EU Intel HD Graphics GPU up to 750MHz with high performance AV1 codec support. We have a passive aluminum heat sink over the processor.
These boards differ mainly in their form factor, power connection and PCIe slots.
- ASRock N100DC-ITX features ATX 24 pin power connector and PCIe 3.0 x16 + PCIe x1 slot.
- ASRock N100M features 19V power connector and one PCIe 3.0 x1 slot.
These boards offer support for one memory slot where we can mount a DDR4 DIMM module up to 3200 Mhz. For storage we have two connectors for SSD M.2 NVMe 2280 PCIe Gen3x2 and three SATA connectors.
Other features
In the wireless connectivity section we have an M.2 connector where we can connect a Wifi + Bluetooth card. On the perimeter of the boards we find a USB-C 3.2 port (10 Gbps), two USB-A 3.2 and four USB 2.0. We also have a PS/2 port, a Gigabit network port, a VGA port, an HDMI 2.1 output, and a DisplayPort 1.4, the latter two with support for 4K@60Hz video output.
This hardware is compatible with Windows 11 and Linux. This hardware allows us to assemble a fairly complete mini PC tailored to our needs.
Pricing and availability
Source for price?
I would be curious to know this too. I haven’t seen any pricing information so far. Not even a release date.