ASRock X870E Taichi Motherboard Review – Stronger VRM, Better Features, Great Price

Conclusion - Upgraded Taichi At An Attractive High-End Price

It's been two years since we tested a Taichi motherboard for the AMD Ryzen platform. The last one was the X670E Taichi which was a fantastic motherboard with loads of power and today, we get to see the next-generation Taichi based on the X870E chipset. As you can expect from a Taichi board, the X870E design is loaded with tons of power and features that make it a great upgrade over the previous model and the best part is the pricing.

In terms of performance, the ASRock X870E Taichi delivered great out-of-the-box performance and was also able to easily meet our baseline overclocking test using the flagship Ryzen 9 9950X. It comes pre-loaded with the AGESA 1.2.0.2 BIOS which brings a range of new features and the boot times are also very decent and not an issue as we saw on the first generation of AM5 designs. The 24+2+1 power design with 110A power stages, the use of 20K caps, and a premium 8-layer PCB all make for a motherboard that is meant to rip open the full potential of Ryzen CPUs.

For memory support, ASRock goes for a four DIMM DDR5 solution with up to 256 GB capacity support and up to 8200 MT/s speeds. The motherboard supports both XMP and EXPO modes, pushing for really high frequencies in 1:2 mode. We were able to get it up to DDR5-8000 MT/s. ASRock also uses a slightly newer BIOS design while retaining the BIOS flashback feature which allows users to flash to the latest BIOS with a USB stick without having CPU, Memory, or other components installed on the motherboard.

The motherboard also has some strong cooling capabilities which are required for this beefy VRM design. The VRMs are cooled off by large heatsinks with heatpipe and there's also a fan integrated into the heatsink which doesn't produce a lot of noise but does work to drop the temps by a bit. We saw up to 8C temps drop with the fan enabled versus it disabled so it's a plus. The board also has 8 fan headers, enough for your cooling needs and even the M.2 heatsinks are beefy and enough to handle the fastest Gen5 SSDs.

The things we loved about the ASRock X870E Taichi:

• Attractive Pricing
• Amazing Design
• Strong VRM Solution
• Faster Memory Support
• Great VRM Heatsink With Active-Cooling
• Lots of USB ports (Including USB4)
• Four M.2 slots with heatsinks
• Latest WIFI7 & BT5.4 Support
• EZ Toolless Design For GPU & M.2 Slots
• Solid BIOS Firmware

Things that we would have liked to see:

• Dual LAN ports
• Better placement for CMOS battery
• Toolless design on the second M.2 heatsink
• An optional power delivery port
• More Gen5 M.2 slots

Regarding storage options, you are getting four M.2 slots, one of which is Gen5 while the rest are Gen4 but retain full bandwidth. The PCIe slots are also full x16 designs with Gen5 x16 on a single & Gen5 x8 in dual mode. ASRock has followed some of the latest design approaches to make the GPU and M.2 device installation and removal easy through its EZ Release mechanisms, making for an effortless experience.

On the USB side, the motherboard has a total of 23 USB connections including 2 USB4 Type-C and 15 USB 3.2 ports (Gen 2x2+Gen2+Gen1). All ports support ESD protection and the rear IO ports are also packed with BIOS flashback, USB, and various other options. There's just one 5GbE LAN port which might be seen as a downside for the flagship offering since others are offering dual LAN on their designs. Audio through ALC4082 and wireless connectivity through the WIFI7 chip are also an upgrade over the previous model.

Now for the pricing, the ASRock X670E Taichi launched at $499 US and currently, it retails for $379. The ASRock X870E Taichi has a price point of $449 US which is cheaper than the launch price of its predecessor and given the whole feature upgrade, that's quite an attractive offering. Overall, the X870E Taichi is a solid high-end offering from ASRock, one that has a lot of power and a lot of IO features while upgrading the design that complements modern PCs.

 

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