ASRock Z890 Taichi Motherboard Review – The Next-Generation of Taichi Is Loaded With Powerful VRM, Six M.2 & Cool VRMs

Conclusion - Six M.2 Slots, Strong VRM, Great Cooling, Lots of IO In Next-Gen Taichi

It's been two years since we tested a Taichi motherboard for the Intel platform. The last one was the Z790 Taichi which was a fantastic motherboard with loads of power and today, we get to see the next-generation Taichi based on the Z890 chipset. As you can expect from a Taichi board, the Z890 design is loaded with tons of power and features that make it a great upgrade over the previous model.

In terms of performance, the ASRock Z890 Taichi delivered great out-of-the-box performance and was also able to easily meet our baseline overclocking test using the flagship Core Ultra 9 285K and setting it to 5.7 GHz across all cores. 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 making it one of the best options to overclock the CPU.

For memory support, ASRock goes for a four DIMM DDR5 solution with up to 256 GB capacity support and up to 9600 MT/s speeds, a major increase over the 7200 MT/s of the Z790 Taichi. The motherboard supports both XMP modes and is ready for CUDIMM DDR5 modules, pushing for really high frequencies in Gear 2 mode. The motherboard had no problem running the stock DDR5 kit at 8000 MT/s out of the box and even the 9200 MT/s OC profile booted up easily. 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 9C 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 Z890 Taichi:

• Amazing Design
• Strong VRM Solution
• Faster Memory Support (9600 MT/s+)
• Great OC Memory Support
• Great VRM Heatsink With Active-Cooling
• Lots of USB ports (Including Dual USB4)
• Six M.2 slots with heatsinks
• Latest WIFI7 & BT5.4 Support
• EZ Toolless Design For GPU & M.2 Slots
• Added M.2 Expansion Card
• Dual LAN Ports (5+2.5 GbE)
• Solid BIOS Firmware
• ATX Form Factor

Things that we would have liked to see:

• Lower Price
• More Audio Jacks

Regarding storage options, you are getting six M.2 slots, one of which is Gen5 while the rest are Gen4 but retain full bandwidth. That's the highest number of M.2 slots we have seen on the Z890 boards that we have received so far and there's even a bundled expansion card that you can equip for an additional four Gen4 M.2 slots. There's also a full bandwidth PCIe 5.0 x16 slot for discrete GPUs. 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 21 USB connections including 2 USB4 Type-C ports. All ports support ESD protection and the rear IO ports are also packed with BIOS flashback, USB, and various other options. There are also dual LAN ports in the form of a single 2.5GbE and a single 5GbE connection. Audio through ALC4082 and wireless connectivity through the WIFI7 chip are also an upgrade over the previous model.

ASRock has gone all out with the next generation of the Taichi series. The Z890 Taichi is a very strong motherboard with lots of features, offering great performance, great thermals on VRMs & SSDs, and supports really fast memory. The Taichi covers all your needs. It's priced at $499 US and while that is a fair bit higher in the premium segment, the Taichi does have a lot of muscles to flex, and it does well.

 

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