Friday, September 28th 2018
ASRock Teases Phantom Gaming Motherboards with Integrated 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN
When ASRock teased something new from their new Phantom Gaming brand on social media with a photo that said 2.5x fast, people were quick to speculate this was referring to an AMD Radeon GPU. After all, the Phantom Gaming brand came about very recently with ASRock's debut as an AMD AIB (add-in board) partners for Radeon GPUs, with TechPowerUp giving a review treatment to one that you can read here. Was Vega holding back with some sandbags? Or was it perhaps the rumored Polaris GPU?
As it turned out today, ASRock was instead teasing about motherboards joining the Phantom Gaming brand and the "2.5x fast" instead was referring to these board having an integrated 2.5 Gigabit onboard LAN port, as opposed to the 1 GigE ports on most enthusiast motherboards today. Suffice to say that led to disappointment for many owing to this misunderstanding, but this is still news in that ASRock has deemed the importance of having a higher-tier brand that can be marketed as a competitor to the ASUS ROG, Gigabyte Aorus and more. This motherboard may end up not being AMD-exclusive either, as we do not expect a prosumer socket from AMD until next year, and the timing suggests it may well be an Intel z390 socket board instead. The teaser video is embedded below, although there is not much else to glean from it at this point.
As it turned out today, ASRock was instead teasing about motherboards joining the Phantom Gaming brand and the "2.5x fast" instead was referring to these board having an integrated 2.5 Gigabit onboard LAN port, as opposed to the 1 GigE ports on most enthusiast motherboards today. Suffice to say that led to disappointment for many owing to this misunderstanding, but this is still news in that ASRock has deemed the importance of having a higher-tier brand that can be marketed as a competitor to the ASUS ROG, Gigabyte Aorus and more. This motherboard may end up not being AMD-exclusive either, as we do not expect a prosumer socket from AMD until next year, and the timing suggests it may well be an Intel z390 socket board instead. The teaser video is embedded below, although there is not much else to glean from it at this point.