Their creativity in these board designs is fun to watch. They have managed to pack so much into that board area, given a little stretch outside the standards. It's a shame Mini-ATX never really caught on.
It must be an interesting culture over there to allow these sorts of designs to get to the retail market outside of their chassis, in comparison to, e.g., SuperMicro WIO designs that don't really fit anything but SM chassis.
I love them specifically for their server motherboards. Very innovative designs with a variety of chipset support and form factors. Well built, reliable, featureful, and relatively inexpensive. They're eating into Supermicro's dominance in the market.
I'm not sure that's right. Does ASRock have any product in the miniPC market? All I see are brands like Beelink and Minisforum, and they shove Ryzen5/7/9 and Core i5/i7/i9 in boxes similar to raspberry pis.
Did ASRock had anything to do with any of the standards?
Meanwhile, any product being sold by the likes of Beelink and Minisforum is far smaller than any of those standard. The board alone is about a quarter of that area.
Why do you claim that ASRock pushes any form of boundaries in small form factor PCs?
If you are thinking SFF in terms of smaller than itx, then no, not really.
If you think creating a new form factor that others want to standardize means pushing boundries, then no.
Beelink and Minisforum don't sell motherboards. They sell barebone PCS with soldered on CPUs. And certainly not anything in the HEDT space. So they are in a completely different category IMO.
But utilizing the existing standards of itx/mini-atx (or nearly so), ASRock is far and away a leader in this genre. They are packing so many features into these form factors that few, if any, are able or willing to replicate.
> If you think creating a new form factor that others want to standardize means pushing boundries, then no.
I'm not sure your opinion is well founded. Take a cursory look at Amazon,and search for mini PCs. The bulk of all the offers follow one of two form factors, ASRock is nowhere to be found.
It must be an interesting culture over there to allow these sorts of designs to get to the retail market outside of their chassis, in comparison to, e.g., SuperMicro WIO designs that don't really fit anything but SM chassis.