ASUS Announces a Pair of ROG STRIX Mini-ITX Motherboards: H270I and B250I
ASUS has further increased its Intel 200-series chipset-based motherboards with the addition of two Mini-ITX motherboards. The H270I and B250I join the ROG staple of motherboards from ASUS, which means these come packed with features and are being marketed for gamers. Though the features are looking a bit thin, which was to be somewhat expected given the lack of PCB real-estate to house them.
These two motherboards do not support any kind of OC, and memory speeds are thus limited to the stock Intel 2400 MHz (and further limited to two sticks of memory up to a 32 GB total.) Furthermore, there is a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, a gaping absence of PCI ports, but a saving grace of two M.2 ports in each motherboard. Which are, yes, very hard to see: one of them fits in the front of the PCB, under the double-decker heatsink design over the PCH that allows an M.2 drive to be stacked on top of it, which means the PCH and the M.2 drive are cooled by the top of the heatsink. The other, which we can't see in the pictures, is located on the back of the motherboard. Both M.2 connectors can handle full-speed PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs, as well as Intel Optane Memory, but only one of them supports SATA-based M.2 solid state drives.
These two motherboards do not support any kind of OC, and memory speeds are thus limited to the stock Intel 2400 MHz (and further limited to two sticks of memory up to a 32 GB total.) Furthermore, there is a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot, a gaping absence of PCI ports, but a saving grace of two M.2 ports in each motherboard. Which are, yes, very hard to see: one of them fits in the front of the PCB, under the double-decker heatsink design over the PCH that allows an M.2 drive to be stacked on top of it, which means the PCH and the M.2 drive are cooled by the top of the heatsink. The other, which we can't see in the pictures, is located on the back of the motherboard. Both M.2 connectors can handle full-speed PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe SSDs, as well as Intel Optane Memory, but only one of them supports SATA-based M.2 solid state drives.
