ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi Motherboard Review

Introduction

Intel launched its new CPUs, the Intel Core Ultra 200S desktop processors, based on socket LGA 1851 on October 24th. With the launch of their newest desktop CPUs comes a new lineup of motherboards based on the Z890 chipset. Today we have the ASRock Phantom Gaming Riptide Z890M WiFi for evaluation.

ASRock has quite a lineup to offer. At the top are the Taichi motherboards, under that the Phantom Gaming boards followed by the Steel Legend, the Live Mixer, and the Pro Series. There are five Phantom Gaming branded motherboards, the NOVA WiFi, RIPTIDE WiFi, Lightning WiFi, Z890M RIPTIDE WiFi, and the Z890I NOVA WiFi. As the name implies these are ASRock’s gaming-themed motherboards and therefore have a common color scheme and design.

If you aren’t familiar with the Intel Core Ultra 200S series CPUs, check out our review, as well as information on the Intel Z890 chipset. PCIe lanes have increased to 20x PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU, and 24x PCIe 4.0 lanes from the chipset, allowing for 48x PCIe lanes this generation. This also brings the support for PCIe Gen5 NVME support on the primary M.2 slots, as well as x16 Gen5 graphics. It also has official support of JEDEC DDR5 6400MT/s (with CUDIMMs) and Thunderbolt 4. WiFi 7 is offered on many of the motherboard models as well.

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi is a micro ATM motherboard, so it is slightly smaller than the standard ATX form factors, still offering all the new features of the Z890 chipset and Intel Core Ultra 200 lineup of CPUs. Retail pricing has this board at $259. We will find out if this smaller form factor can compete with the bigger dogs.

Packaging and Contents

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: retail box

We received a full retail packaged box from ASRock. The packaging was identical to all the ASRock boards we have reviewed, but the board and box are smaller of course. The board fits well inside and is protected by cardboard inserts. The motherboard is inside a thick anti-static bag. Accessories included the WiFi antenna, a bag of SATA cables, an RGB extension splitter cable, a case badge, the mystery plastic button, and a thermistor cable. A “Quick Start Guide” was also included.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi Features

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi is a microATX motherboard. The overall measurements for the form factor are 9.6 inches by 9.6 inches. The width is the same as a full ATX board but the length of the board is short by about 2.5 inches. When you pick up this motherboard, other than size, it feels sturdy and well-constructed. There is no give or bend to the board.

The PCB is supported by an eight-layer, 2-ounce copper server-grade material. The color scheme is common to the Phantom Gaming tier and notes a board that is all black with blue, red, and purple accents. The color scheme is well done and the board is very well styled. There are RGB LEDs along the bottom of the secondary M.2 heatsinks and just to the right of the chipset heatsink. They can be controlled by Polychrome Sync in the UEFI/BIOS or downloaded software.

The VRM, M.2 and chipset heatsinks are all heavy brushed aluminum. There are three M.2 slots on this motherboard, each with thermal pads pre-installed. The primary M.2 slot has an EZ release heatsink latch. All M.2 are tool-less holddowns. The secondary M.2 heatsinks do require a Phillips screwdriver. There is only one PCIe expansion slot on the board. It is metal-reinforced but has no fancy EZ release mechanism. Likewise, there are no digital DeBugs to troubleshoot, but there are DeBug LEDs along the top right border of the board.

There is ample connectivity on the I/O back panel as well as the motherboard itself. The wired ethernet is a 2.5Gb Intel Killer E3100G. WiFi is actually 6E and not WiFi7 as with most other boards in the line-up. It is through an Intel Killer AX 1690i chip. Audio is 7.1 channel capable via a RealTek ALC 897 Codec. The headphone output supports Nihimic software by SteelSeries.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: full board

Power Delivery

This motherboard uses a 16+1+1 power phase set-up with 80amps across the VCore. There is SPS with DrMOS circuitry as well. This should be more than adequate power and protection for any overclocking.

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi utilizes 20K Black capacitors with 1000 microFarad capacitance. This is expected to prolong the life of the capacitors and give a more stable response to demand. As we have discussed, the heatsinks are quite large and heavy. There do not appear to be any heatpipes in the layout. Power is supplied by two 8-pin CPU power connectors at the top of the board.

CPU Socket, Memory and Storage

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi utilizes the new socket 1851 and is labeled RL-ILM (Reduced Load-Independant Loading Mechanism). This socket is an improvement from prior sockets and is available to motherboard manufacturers as an upgrade option. This socket design is meant to spread the load and contact more across the entire IHS. There is ample room on the board around the socket. Our MSI MAG CoreLiquid I360 AIO fit without any issue.

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi has 4 DIMM slots and supports DDR5 memory up to 9600MT/s (overclocked). The maximum capacity of the DIMMs is 256GB. XMP3.0 memory profiles are supported. The slots are spaced far enough from the CPU bracket to allow easy placement of our AIO cooler. We can not imagine a problem mounting almost any CPU cooler unless you purchase memory with an extraordinarily tall heat sink enclosure or RGB. The newest advancement in memory, Clocked Unbuffered DIMM (CUDIMM) is also supported. So, please consult the QVL list when you purchase memory for your board. Memory lanes are also protected by a “Memory OC Shield ” overlay.

As far as storage goes, there are three M.2 slots available. The primary(Blazing) is Gen5x4 speed. The heatsink has an EZ release latch mechanism. The heatsink is a thick brushed aluminum. The top and bottom of the slot have thermal pads mounted. The two secondary M.2(Hyper) are Gen4x4 with only top-mounted thermal pads. These heatsinks are mounted with embedded Phillips screws. Likewise, these are brushed aluminum. All three slots have toolless hold-down mechanisms.

The main problem one will have using these two lower slots is that they are directly under the one and only PCIe slot. You simply will not be able to mount thick actively cooled SSDs here. Thin NVME-type SSDs will be fine and even utilize the heatsink top. A thicker passively cooled SSD may fit BUT you will not be able to mount the heatsink top due to height restriction. There are also four SATA 6Gb/s connectors mounted at 90 degrees on the right side of the board. The wireless chip is mounted in an M.2E slot to the left of the PCIe slot.

M.2 speeds are as follows: M.2_1 128Gb/s, M.2_2 and _3 64Gb/s. The primary M.2 and one secondary are from the CPU and the third M.2 and SATA connections are from the chipset.

Expansion

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: expansion slot

Discussing expansion slots on the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi is pretty short and sweet. There is only one PCIex16 slot on this board. You can see it is metal-reinforced but has no fancy release mechanism. It is a tight squeeze to get to the release lever with a full-sized Gen5 SSD in the primary slot. A triple-slot GPU will reach the bottom of this motherboard.

I/O

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: I/O panel

The rear I/O panel of the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi is fairly well-supplied. First off, the motherboard plate is embedded for easy application. From left to right we have: wireless antenna ports and the BIOS Flashback button, display port and HDMI port, two rows of USB Gen3.2 type A(10Gb/s) and Thunderbolt USB Type C, aka USB4,(40Gb/s), a 2.5Gb/s RJ-45 ethernet and two USB 2.0 Type A, four USB Gen3.1 USB Type A (5Gb/s) and lastly SPDIF and two 3.5mm audio jacks.

In addition, on board there are a total of seven four-pin fan headers; two CPU and an AIO header at the top of the board, two chassis fans and a water pump header on the bottom edge, and finally a chassis fan header next to the primary M.2 heatsink. All of these may be controlled by the UEFI/BIOS.

Furthermore, on the right edge of the board, we have a single USB type C front panel header (20Gb/s) a single USB Gen 3.1 header (5Gb/s), and four SATA ports. The bottom edge houses the front panel header, two USB 2.0 headers, and the front audio header. This board has a total of three LED headers, two are addressable and one is a 12V four-pin header. The board comes with a RGB splitter for all your RGBs. As far as connectivity, this little motherboard has nearly everything the full ATX boards offer, not bad right there.

UEFI/BIOS

The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi uses a standard UEFI BIOS, an American Megatrend AMI UEFI. UEFI is easily entered from the logo screen and presents you with the main screen. The BIOS enters the main screen for the Advanced Mode. There is an “Easy Mode” and an “Advanced Mode” as you will see in the screenshots. The BIOS selections are vast with configuration of both CPU and memory functions almost endless. There are also several configuration submenus for I/O functions as well. There are submenu selections common to ASRock that we have found very helpful to include: “Fan-tastic” fan cycle control, Instant Flash, Auto Driver Installer, and Polychrome Sync RGB control.

Our motherboard was sent to us with the 2.02 BIOS version dated 4 OCT 2024. The most recent version is dated 5 NOV 2024, version 2.08.AS01. We used the Instant Flash from within the BIOS to update. This utility is painless and works very well. The unzipped file is placed on a flash drive, plugged into a USB port and the utility finds the file. Easy. ASRock also has the “BIOS Flashback” utility. You don’t need a CPU installed, just a flash drive with the BIOS and a PSU. Nice instructions are available. Also, ASRock has a very complete BIOS manual available on the motherboard’s support page.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: UEFI/BIOS

Overall, the UEFI/BIOS on the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi is very straightforward and simple to navigate. The menus are very intuitive. The submenus are vast as we have discussed. There are options that have options. One can get in pretty deep into the CPU, memory, and chipset if tweaking is what you like. On the other hand, there are also handy automatic selections and tools to choose from.

Subsystem and CPU Testing

Testing the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi was accomplished using the benchmarks below. The following components were used: Intel Core Ultra 5 245K, Corsair Vengence DDR5 32GB at 6000MT/s (CMH32G5M2D6000C36), ADATA Legend 970 Gen5 NVME SSD and ASRock Radeon™ RX 7600 XT Steel Legend 16GB OC graphics card. We do have limited data sets to date due to the new release of both CPU and motherboard chipsets. Comparison results are discussed from the recent review of the MSI MEG Z890 ACE, the GIGABYTE Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi, and the Intel Core Ultra 5 245K review.

M.2 Performance

In this section, we utilized CrystalDiskMark to evaluate the performance of our Gen5 drive. We tested all three slots. One downside here is the size of our drive. The height of the ADATA Legend 970 precludes its’ use in M.2 slots #2 and #3 with a graphics card installed. In those two slots, we removed the GPU and utilized the onboard integrated graphics of the CPU. If you are planning to use this motherboard’s M.2 slots to their fullest, a very low-profile NVME SSD will be needed. The height of your SSDs native heatsink will also determine if you can use the motherboard heatsink cover.

You can see the slots performed as advertised. #1 Gen5 and #2 and 3 Gen4, very much in keeping with our other two Z890 motherboards.

Memory Bandwidth

Here we are using AIDA64 Cache and Memory Benchmark. The Corsair DDR5 modules are set to their XMP profiles. The performance is identical to our comparison boards accounting for the difference in components.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: AIDA64 memory bandwidth

PCMark 10

We utilize the standard full-system PCMark 10 benchmark to measure typical office productivity and performance. The results are in line with our other motherboard reviews but about 1000 points shy of our X870 testing.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: PCMark 10

Cinebench R23

The standard Cinebench R23 benchmark was run for 10 minutes in both single and multicore CPU testing. Our results were 2052 and 24859 respectively. The results are very similar to our Core Ultra 5 245K review, as you would expect.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: Cinebench R23

Blender Benchmark

Using Blender our results are Monster 149.3, junkshop 98.3, and Classroom 72.8. These fall in line with our other results testing a Core Ultra 5 245K. 

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: Blender Benchmark

3DMark

Using 3DMark we tested the CPU, Integrated graphics and also our ASRock Steel Legend Rx 7600 XT 16GB GPU. The max Threads result is in keeping with the performance in the Core Ultra 5 245K review. We have no data on the Night Raid or the Time Spy values as this is the initial motherboard review using the Core Ultra 5 245K, so stay tuned…..more to come in the coming weeks.

VRay Benchmark

Here we run the CPU-only benchmark in V-Ray. As expected, the same as our Core Ultra 5 245K review.

ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi: VRay

VRM Temperatures

In this section, we run the Cinebench R23 multicore test for 20 minutes. We measured temperature response using HWInfo64 but found the MOS TEMP (VRMs) to be essentially nonresponsive. We attached the thermistor probe included with the motherboard and recorded the temperature response at the VRM heatsink at the top of the motherboard. On the right, you can see that the CPU was running 100% load at 60C maximum while the VRM/MOS probe recorded a cool 28.5C. Also on the left, you can see that the software was only showing the VRM/MOS at 16C under the same load…..something isn’t right there. regardless, the VRMs are well-cooled on the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M WiFi.

Conclusion

In our review, we had the opportunity to work with something a little bit different, a Micro ATX motherboard. The ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi was paired up with a brand new Intel Core Ultra 5 245K CPU. This motherboard, despite its size, offers four DIMM slots capable of 9466MT/s (overclocked), Gen5 M.2, and PCIe support with very capable power delivery and cooling. The UEFI/BIOS can stand toe to toe with any motherboard. This Phantom Gaming-themed board also offers plenty of connectivity to include the latest Thunderbolt4. At its current retail price of $259, that’s a pretty nice package.

Installation and Use

Set up and initial startup of the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi was completely uncomplicated. Every step of the way, this board just worked as you would expect, with no hiccups anywhere. This is especially nice considering it’s a new board chipset and new CPU.

The CPU socket area is clear of any obstructions. Installing our AIO was easy, with plenty of room. The memory slots are the old-school latch on both ends, but no issues. We would only conceive of a space problem with a wide air cooler and tall RGB memory modules. Our M.2 primary drive is actively cooled and quite tall. We have never been able to use the top of the motherboard’s heatsink, so this is not an isolated problem.

The lone PCIe slot has no fancy latch release, so be patient when trying to remove the GPU. We would suggest you remove the primary M.2 drive first if you want to save your temper. Recall this is a short motherboard. A triple-slot GPU will likely overhang the bottom of the board. This may make it a little tricky to use the bottom-row headers. You absolutely will find the secondary M.2 slots covered by the GPU, regardless of size. You will need to carefully select thin NVME drives so as not to run into issues with placement or cooling.

The first boot into the BIOS was painless. The BIOS is very straightforward, but the tweaker menu is vast. You will need a guide if you want to explore it. If you like to tweak your CPU or memory, this BIOS is for you. Booting to install Windows was no problem. Everything just worked as it should. Every slot, port, USB, and output port just worked. Every benchmark ran smoothly and you can compare results to other reviews. Accounting for various component differences all results were as expected.

Final Points

Our review evaluated the ASRock Phantom Gaming Z890M Riptide WiFi motherboard. This smaller motherboard is in the Phantom Gaming theme and is pointed toward gamers and enthusiasts. With the Riptide branding signifies a specific kind of water current with strong waves that occur in the ocean., representing the sea’s double-side, calm, and unlimited strength. With a few exceptions, you will have all the connectivity you need in a slightly smaller package.

The motherboard worked flawlessly right out of the box, we encountered no issues. This is a good-looking, well-built motherboard with everything you need, though you will have to contend with WiFi 6E instead of WiFi 7 support, which is common in other motherboards of this generation. There are smaller ITX boards with WiFi 7, though you will pay more for it. The price, at least, is under $300 for this motherboard, which aligns with the lower-tier WiFi support, and 2.5G connectivity, but also gives you a bigger board with the micro-ATX form factor for expansion. If you like to tinker in the BIOS you have many, many options there. For a well-built, smaller-scale motherboard, this one is well-equipped. You will not be disappointed.

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