Back Original

Milk-V Titan: A $329 8-Core 64-bit RISC-V mini-ITX board with PCIe Gen4x16

We first noted the UltraRISC UR-DP1000-powered Milk-V Titan mini-ITX motherboard when we wrote an article about three high-performance RISC-V processors to watch in H2 2025. There have been some delays, as there often are, but the Titan board finally appears to be in stock, so it’s probably a good time to have a closer look.

Powered by a 2 GHz UR-DP1000 octa-core RISC-V CPU, the Titan mini-ITX motherboard supports up to 64GB DIMM memory and M.2 NVMe storage (PCIe Gen4 x4), and features a PCIe Gen4 x16 slot for a graphics card or other expansion, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, a BMC, and more.

Milk-V Titan mini-ITX motherboard

Milk-V Titan specifications:

UR-DP1000 RISC-V mini-ITX motherboardWe’ll notice there’s no video output, and users will need to add a graphics card if they need it. Four models have been tested based on the documentation for the board: AMD RX 9070 XT, RX 580, RX 550, and R5 230. Alternatively, the board could be used for networking and/or storage applications by using a suitable PCIe card. Another remark is that idle power consumption is not super low at about 14 Watts with 64GB RAM and a 128GB SSD.

The company mentions support for Ubuntu (preferred OS), Debian, and Fedora, but software-related documentation is still a work in progress. Other RISC-V OS images should be supported thanks to UEFI support with ACPI, CPPC, and SMBIOS. In our article about the UR-DP1000 CPU last July, we also noted that mainline Linux support was expected by Q4 2026. As a side note, I was quite pleased with the progress made on the software side of the RISC-V ecosystem in my recent reviews of the MUSE Book laptop and VisionFive 2 Lite SBC, even though the performance and the price/performance ratio are not there yet.

Titan RISC-V motherboard bottom side
Bottom side

In terms of performance, we are still provided the SPECCPU2006 single-core INT @ 10.4/GHz and single-core FP @ 12/GHz, but the UR-DP1000 SoC also shows up on GeekBench 5.5.1 with almost 30% higher single-core performance and over twice the multi-core performance compared to the ESWIN EIC7702-based  (8x RISC-V @ 1.8 GHz) DeepComputing FML13V03 laptop, better known as the “DC-ROMA RISC-V Mainboard Gen II for Framework”.

UR-DP1000 vs ESWIN EIC7702X Geekbench
UR-DP1000 vs ESWIN EIC7702X hardware benchmarks in Geekbench 5.5.1

It looks promising at first, but after reading Jeff Geerling’s review of the DeepComputing laptop, the single-core performance is quite lower than a Raspberry Pi 4 (178 vs 286 in Geekbench 6), and multi-core is about equivalent (640 vs 653) despite the EIC7702X having twice the number of cores. If we extrapolate those results, we can roughly estimate the Titan’s performance: single-core performance should be almost equivalent to that of a Raspberry Pi 4, and multi-core performance closer to that of the Raspberry Pi 5, albeit still under. The Titan motherboard still wins when it comes to PCIe interfaces and out-of-the-box graphics card support, but you can not expect a miracle when it comes to CPU performance, even though some software optimization may have improved the results since the GeekBench 5.5.1 was performed (July 2025).

The Titan mini-ITX motherboard can now be ordered on Arace for $329, a bit higher than for earlier pre-orders ($279). The Arace website is confusing, as it says “in stock”, but the title still views it as a “pre-order shipping within 45 days”. You’ll also need to purchase a UDIMM RAM module and an NVMe SSD for storage to get started, as well as an optional PCIe card for graphics, networking, or storage, if you want to make use of the PCIe Gen4 x16 slot.

Thanks to Teka for the tip.

Support CNX Software! Donate via cryptocurrencies, become a Patron on Patreon, or purchase goods on Amazon or Aliexpress. We also use affiliate links in articles to earn commissions if you make a purchase after clicking on those links.