Will the VII Impact and VIII Impact have a baby for AM4?

[xAeciiD]

Hey there! 🙂

I'm looking for a Mini-ITX board that features WiFi / Bluetooth, a audio solution that isn't total garbage and has the ability to fit a M.2 2280 SSD.

If I am not mistaken the Impact Vii had some sort of hybrid solution for the WiFi adapter where you could slide a up to 2280 M.2 SSD into it. I just need 2 Sata 6G ports so I don't care about SATA express.

What are the odds that something like this happens? I doubt that any ASUS employee will state anything here but maybe someone who is more into building Mini-ITX can share his knowledge and thoughts with me?

P. S. Has anybody experience with the Impact Viii and painting it? The few red parts seem like they are just covers and could be detached. It's not like there is much color variety in the Mini-ITX market. Especially when it comes to feature rich boards Black + Red is the theme. I would love to make at least the red accents disappear. I could live with the gun-metal like look.

Edit: I noticed that the M.2 port of the Vii was replaced with an U.2 port on the Viii. Sadly the only consumer SSD that utilizeds U.2 has a way worse price to performance ratio than the 950 Pro by Samsung. I know that RoG stands for innovation and offering the greatest but .. for my liking this is super quick. Even though the U.2 SSD by Intel isn't that new, there still isn't anything else on the consumer market if I did my research correctly. Some sort of vertical U.2 to M.2 converter would be interesting if the case allowes it.

[Mackan]

Pretty sure that Asus will release an ITX board for AM4 and Zen. I remember reading an article stating they do cooperate closely with AMD, and will release boards for AM4 when Zen arrives.

Impact VII was better than the VIII in my opinion. It had M.2 SSD, and an overall nicer color theme, even if I am also tired of red & black. Pretty sure that a M.2 SSD slot will return on the next Impact, or the itx board for AM4. It was simply a mistake from Asus to not include it. If they want, they can probably replace the SATA Express port with a U.2 port, and we get both M.2 and U.2. The problem is that these small M.2 SSDs easily throttle, they are in need of heatsinks.

Regarding color variety in the ITX market, it sucks. All the love goes to ATX still. A few years back Asus did release some more varieties of ITX boards. I remember a yellow one, and a blue one. Today we only get some reddish ones with abysmal gamer logos you just want to rip off. I hope they will give itx boards some more love the next generation. How about a pure black one? Or a Sabertooth themed one? Or a remake of that blue one a few years back? Really don't understand why we can't get more professional looking ones, that also have all the features.