Motherboards

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review

FAST / MYSETERIOUS / UNBEATABLE

BIOS

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 1 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

ASRock starts you out in the ‘EZ Mode’ of the BIOS. You get a quick rundown of everything in the PC, as well as some basic options like turning on RAID or XMP.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 2 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

Hitting F6 brings you to an advanced mode where all of the settings live. The Main tab is more of a landing page showing basic system specs.

 

The OC Tweaker page is where most will spend the most time. You can also save 10 different profiles and load them as you please.

Clock speeds, multipliers, voltages, and the works can all be found under here in their respective sub-menus.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 8 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

The Advanced page lets you dive a little deeper into certain areas like I/O or USB configuration.

Each of the advanced pages offers some important but less often needed settings.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 12 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

The tools page is an important one and was our first stop to update our system to the latest available BIOS.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 13 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

The hardware monitor is pretty self-explanatory. You can keep tabs on all system voltages, temperatures, fan speeds, and everything else related here.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 14 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

You can also tune all of your connected fans from here.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 15 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

Most enthusiasts probably won’t use anything in the security tab, but a BIOS password can be set here as well as turning on the Trusted Platform module if installed, handy if you deploy this board in an office or similar environment.

ASRock Z490 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB3 Review 16 ASRock, Intel, ITX, Mini-ITX, Phantom Gaming, SFF, Small Form Factor, Thunderbolt

Here in the Boot tab, you can configure things like boot order, and even turn off the full-screen boot logo if you prefer to see a quick summary instead.

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And last but not least the Exit Tab, you can save or discard changes made this session, as well as restore defaults. You can also override boot settings to boot to a different device just this one time.

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