ASRock introduced its all-new compact DeskMeet and DeskSlim PCs with AMD's Ryzen 7000-series processors at Computex. They go up to a 65W TDP, a discrete graphics card, and a high-performance SSD with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The company is showcasing working systems at the Taipei-based tradeshow, so they will likely hit the market in the coming months.
ASRock's DeskMeet PCs sit in an intersection between compact desktops and higher-end gaming machines. Their latest generation is based on an ASRock AM5 motherboard with four DDR5 memory slots, two M.2 slots (PCIe 5.0 and PCIe 4.0), and a 2.5 GbE. These machines can fit in pretty powerful components such as dual-slot graphics cards that are 20 cm long, and can be expanded generously thanks to their dimensions and a 500W power supply; but they are by far not as large as fully-fledged desktops.
ASRock's all-new DeskSlim also relies on ASRock's AM5 platform with Ryzen 7000 support with an up to 65W TDP, but it is slimmer and therefore can only house a low-profile graphics card (some of which are very powerful). As an added bonus, they can house a slim optical disk drive, which makes them suitable for home theater PCs and, as ASRock puts it, business usage. These machines will come with a 300W power supply.
Traditionally, ASRock will offer its DeskMeet and DeskSlim as fully equipped systems and as barebones.
At Computex 2023, ASRock demonstrated its next-generation DeskMeet equipped with an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, a 2TB PCIe Gen5 x4 and a 2TB PCIe Gen4 x4 drives, and a Radeon RX 6600 XT Challenger ITX, which is a good midrange gaming PC. By contrast, the DeskSlim came with AMD Ryzen 5 7600 CPU, 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory, a 2TB PCIe Gen4 x4 drive, and an Nvidia RTX 4000 Ada Generation low-profile graphics card.
The PCs in the showroom may not represent configurations that ASRock intends to offer at release, but they give us an idea of what's to come.