ASRock W480 Creator: W480 board for 10 Core Xeons for Creative Minds

ASRock introduced the W480 Creator

Based on the W480 chipset, the Asrock W480 Creator with processors of the Intel Xeon W series based on Comet Lake-S serves as a platform for creatives. With high-quality tension regulation and support for ten-core Cpus, the professional vPro platform primarily addresses professional content creators.

Designed for creatives

With the W480 Creator, a motherboard of the premium class, Asrock wants to appeal primarily to creative people and software developers who want a performance comparable to the Core i9-10900K and i5-10600K (Test) as well as Intel vPro. This is available in the form of the recently introduced Xeon W-1200.

W480 instead of Z490

With the regular chipset variants in the desktop of the type Z490 and H470, the Xeon-W processors of the Comet-Lake-S family do not work together, because Intel has prevented this since Skylake via microcode. This is where the Asrock W480 Creator comes into play with its W480-PCH, which is the basis of the board together with the LGA1200 socket and a voltage regulation with 16-phase VRM.

Up to 128 GB DDR4-4600 and ECC

With dimensions of 305 mm 244 mm, the PCB of the Asrock W480 Creator is designed in ATX format and has four reinforced DDR4 DIMM slots, which officially accommodate up to 128 GB DDR4 with up to 4,600 MT/s and ECC. A total of three Pcie 3.0 x16 and two Pcie 2.0 x1 are available for graphics and expansion cards.

10 Gbe from Aquantia and 2.5 Gbe from Intel

In addition to a 10 Gbe NIC from Aquantia with AQC107 controller, the motherboard has another fast network connection with 2.5 Gbit/s and i225 LM controller from Intel. For connectivity, the Asrock H480 Creator offers eight SATA3 and three M.2 Nvme slots, each with Pcie gen 3.0 x4 connectivity. USB 3.2 Gen2 with 10 GB/s is available five times, two of these ports are designed as Type-C, plus a total of eight USB 3.2 Gen1 with 5 GB/s.

ESS Sabre 9218 DAC with 130dB SNR

A sound solution based on the Realtek ALC1220 audio codec, which was extended by the ESS Sabre 9218 DAC with 130dB SNR for the headphone output and particularly high-quality audio capacitors, the so-called WIMA Audio Caps and Intel Wi-Fi 6 (formerly IEEE