ASRock’s Latest Mini PC Flexes Ryzen And Radeon Firepower Enough For Four 8K Displays
When you’re assembling a PC that needs to fit in a space less than five inches long, that means you’re going to have to settle for mediocre parts with just a few CPU cores and weak graphics, right? Well, not necessarily. Check out ASRock Industrial’s new 4X4 BOX 7000/D5 series.
That means these are based on the revised core of the Zen 3+, not the Zen 4. That’s still a whole lot of processor for just 28W, and from the integrated Radeon 660M (on the 7535U) or 680M (on the 7735U) graphics. These are six- and twelve-CU RDNA 2-based Radeon GPUs, which are probably overkill for most things you’d buy a machine like this for – particularly the 680M, which we think is capable , to play current games with high settings in 1080p .
You can equip one of these 4×4 BOX 7000/D5 systems with a pair of 260-pin 4800 MT/s DDR5 SO-DIMMs with up to 32 GB capacity per module. The systems feature an HDMI 2.0 port and a DisplayPort 1.4a port, as well as a pair of USB Type-C ports that support DisplayPort Alternate Mode, meaning you’re actually connecting four 8K displays to one of these little boxes can, if you’re willing to sacrifice refresh rate.
For other connectivity, you get three USB Type-A ports (two 2.0 and one 3.2 Gen 2) along with the two USB4-capable Type-C ports. There is also a 3.5mm combo audio jack on the front. Arguably one of the most interesting features of these machines are a pair of RJ-45 jacks – one for a Gigabit Ethernet connection with DASH support, while the other is for a 2.5Gbps Ethernet connection. Both are based on Realtek, which means they should “just work right out of the box” on any modern operating system.
As for internal storage, you get a single M.2 2280 slot supporting PCIe 4.0 x4, an M.2 2230 slot pre-populated with a Wi-Fi 6E adapter, and what appears to be a single SATA -III port. We’re not entirely sure how you’d use the SATA connector as there’s no room for a drive as far as we can tell, but the images clearly show that it is there.
Note that the M.2 2280 slot is above the M.2 2230 slot for the Wi-Fi card.
ASRock omitted some important details from its press release; namely, when and for how much you can buy any of these things. Newegg carries some older 4×4 BOX series models, and it looks like they’ll start at around $470. You can expect these to cost more when they eventually arrive at retail.