ASRock Launches Two Celeron “Gemini Lake” ITX Motherboards

ASRock intros two interesting ITX motherboards.

We’re talking about the ASRock J4105-ITX and J4105B-ITX – two motherboards featuring Intel’s new Celeron Gemini Lake. What makes these boards stand out is that they include Celeron J4105 “Gemini Lake” SoCs. These SoCs blend a quad-core “Goldmont Plus” CPU with Intel’s UHD 600 Graphics in order to form a rather decently-powered package. The CPU itself is clocked at 2.50 GHz, which is definitely nothing to write home about but nothing to complain about either. As for the graphics part, it boasts hardware-acceleration of 10bpc HEVC video encoding and decoding. It also has new DRM standards that could support Netflix 4K.

Main differences between the two.

As expected, the two motherboards are similar in many ways. However, the J4105B-ITX also comes with legacy connectivity support such as LPT and RS232 COM ports. Moreover, the 8-channel HD audio is swapped with a 6-channel, for whatever that’s worth. Furthermore, the J4105-ITX has a PCIe x1 slot while the J4105B-ITX includes an x16 slot with x2 wiring. There’s enough room for 8 GB of dual-channel DDR4-2400 memory on both models, which should be enough for day-to-day tasks. As for storage, there are four SATA 6 Gbps ports on the J4105-ITX, and two ports on the J4105B-ITX.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that these will be relatively affordable, easy-to-install motherboards. The price tag shouldn’t exceed $170 for either model, which makes sense since the SoC itself costs around $107.