ASRock Preps Phantom Gaming Motherboards: Initial SKU to Feature 2.5G Ethernet
by Anton Shilov on October 3, 2018 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- AMD
- Intel
- ASRock
- 2.5GBase-T
- Multi-Gig
- Phantom Gaming
ASRock is readying another lineup of motherboards aimed specifically at gamers. The Phantom Gaming mainboards will join ASRock’s Radeon graphics cards that carry the same brand. The first products in the series will feature 2.5G Ethernet.
Right now, ASRock has five families of motherboards, including the Extreme, Taichi, Fatal1ty Gaming, OC Formula, and Pro. Based on a teaser that ASRock recently published over at its YouTube channel, the company is prepping “next generation” Phantom Gaming-branded mainboards.
One of the key features of the Phantom Gaming motherboards will be “2.5G Ethernet with low latency.” At present it is unclear whether the platform is set to use a controller from Aquantia (presumably the AQtion AQC108 in this case) or a yet unannounced silicon from Rivet Networks. In any case, 2.5G Ethernet will be a welcome addition to a gamers-oriented mainboard.
While ASRock does not disclose other specs of its upcoming Phantom Gaming motherboards, we can speculate that the initial family will include at least one platform based on Intel’s upcoming Z390 chipset. Eventually, the lineup will get broader as AMD and Intel introduce their next-gen chipsets.
What remains unclear is whether the new Phantom Gaming lineup will complement the existing families of motherboards, or rather replace one of them going forward. Meanwhile, keeping in mind that ASRock does not publish teasers well in advance of actual product launches, it is likely that we will learn more about its Phantom Gaming motherboards shortly.
Related Reading:
- Aquantia Launch AQtion 5G/2.5G/1G Multi-Gigabit Ethernet Cards (NICs) for PCIe
- The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate Motherboard Review: Aquantia 10GbE on Ryzen
- ASRock Announces X299 Professional Gaming i9 with 3-Way Multi-GPU, 10Gb Ethernet, & Wi-Fi
- ASUS Launches XG-C100C 10 GBase-T Adapter: Aquantia AQC107, $99
- GIGABYTE’s GC-AQC107 10G Ethernet PCIe Card Launched and Listed
- Aquantia’s Gamer Edition AQtion AQN-107 10 GbE NIC Available
Sources: ASRock YouTube, TechPowerUp
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JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
Thanks ASRock for pushing the envelope forward. Not sure if the feature is particularly gamer oriented, when it's more of a prosumer feature, but 2.5G ethernet is welcome either way. Hoping routers, switches, and other networking products follow suit in the near future to provide affordable upgrades to home offices.qlum - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
I think 2.5G could be quite useful in the future when you have a fiber connection that is capped at gbit having this extra bit of bandwidth can make sure the ethernet card isn't the bottleneck. Right now my provider caps out at 750mbit on fiber probably to prevent bottlenecks on the gbit routers they give us.JoeyJoJo123 - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
It should be pretty obvious that home users rarely have compelling reasons besides HD/4K streaming video through services like YouTube/Netflix. But we don't really need 2.5G from a internet provider to get benefits in the home office. We've been stuck on gigabit networking equipment for over a decade, far longer than most people ever even had access to true gigabit internet speeds, but even so, having gigabit networking in the home office has been useful for interconnecting devices/services available from one own's home.CaedenV - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
There is next to no need for more than 1gig connection to the home. Your typical 'high speed' connection to a server is only going to be 20-60Mbps, and you can really only have so many active connections to the outside world at a time even with a home full of teenagers.That said; a 1gig connection to a home server can be extremely frustrating when moving large files, or doing backups from multiple machines. The ability to have at least a few higher speed ports for your main server/NAS and your main desktop/workstation would make a lot of people's lives better... just not $500-1500 better which is what it really costs today to upgrade your NICs and switch.
Flunk - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
Will be be compatible with the Phantom Gaming Network and Phantom Lapboard?Seriously, naming a serious of gaming motherboards after a massive industry failure like the Phantom is just a bad idea.
Samus - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
Please make one ITX.Dragonstongue - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
not sure why they would do that, nice to have a feature available, not so good when lions share of consumers are nowhere near the speed to take advantage of that specific feature.. wonder if they will have a "phantom" with a more "normal" lower latency (not killer based) ethernet solution as well, in theory at least it might save a few $ but allow some folks some more "choice" which is always nice to have ^.^Golgatha777 - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
2.5G would be kind of fun for benchmarking transfers from SSD to SSD across the network, but beyond that, all my bulk backups are limited by the speed of large spinning discs on 1GbE connections for the most part. Does nothing to speed up games or downloads of games.CaedenV - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
Even SSD to HDD. My NAS has 7 3TB HDDs. As long as it is a sequential write it can take anything a 2.5gbps pipe can throw at it. Going from my PCs SSD to a RAID of HDDs would be much improved with a bit more throughput. Being capped at ~103MB/s is soooo 2003Ian Cutress - Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - link
Killer hardware is Intel based now.