ASRock DeskMeet & DeskSlim AM5 Mini PCs Revealed: X600 Motherboards, Designed For Next-Gen AMD Ryzen APUs

ASRock revealed its latest DeskMeet & DeskSlim AM5 Mini PCs which are designed around the next-gen AMD Ryzen APUs launching later this year.

The ASRock DeskMeet and DeskSlim are two Mini PCs that the company has planned to launch later this year. Although the AM4 and Intel variants have been out for a while, the switch to AM5 has been moved to later this year due to one big reason and that's the cost of entry-level CPUs.

On the AMD front, the cheapest Ryzen 7000 CPUs still come in at prices above $200 US and the only budget-level options are on the AM4 camp or Intel's 12/13th Gen which at least offer some Core i3 and Core i5 SKUs under the $150-$200 US price bracket.

But that's about to change with the upcoming AMD Ryzen 7000 APUs which will be available in far better price brackets than Ryzen 7000 CPUs. There's very little information about these APUs but the word from the show floor is that they are indeed coming and will serve as the budget AM5 line.

Both the ASRock DeskMeet and DeskSlim are designed around the AM5 socket and the demo units were running an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU. The company didn't disclose the motherboard itself but it is likely to be part of the X600 series. However, upon a close-up inspection through the DeskSlim, it was noted that the board didn't have any physical chipset or branding on it. This could be due to an early engineering sample but we have already seen a series of Mini-ITX motherboards with a main PCH doing the rounds at Computex.

The motherboard itself carries four DDR5-6000 memory slots that support EXPO and offer up to 128 GB capacities. There are 2 SATA III ports and a single PCIe 4.0 x16 slot. Two M.2 slots can also be seen however the second slot is for a WIFI card. The motherboard comes with a VRM heatsink and there are a nice amount of I/O ports along with a standard 8-Pin CPU & 24-Pin ATX connector for power. An additional M.2 slot can be found on the back of the motherboard too. For I/O, you'll get two DisplayPort, 1 HDMI port, USB 2.0, 2x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A, a BIOS flashback switch, 2.5 GbE LAN, and a 5.1 channel HD audio jack.

In terms of design, the ASRock DeskMeet AM5 will be the bigger of the two, supporting a 500W PSU and 168 x 219.3 x 218.3mm dimensions (8L chassis) while the DeskSlim AM5 will tone things down to 100 x 300 x 218.7mm dimensions (6.5L chassis).

The DeskSlim AM5 seems to only offer TFX Form Factor PSU support and was using a 300W design. It also features support for discrete GPUs but you are limited as to what you can choose due to the lower power budget. Once again, these products are early but ASRock also plans on introducing DeskMini and DeskMeet in Intel's B760 flavors too.