ASRock Z390 Taichi
Price and performance in balance.
ASRock’s Z390 Taichi stands alone as the only ‘normal’ motherboard in our roundup. The Taichi brand successfully targets non-gaming users who aren’t interested in gaming bells and whistles.
The Z390 Taichi closely follows the design cues of its predecessors. The chipset heatsink has a particularly nice look. It has some of splashes of RGB lighting around the chipset heatsink, I/O cover and audio section. The VRM heatsinks for most Z390 boards have really been beefed up and there’s a heatpipe connecting the two large, screw-down heatsinks.
To cope with the increased demands of eight-core 9th generation processors, ASRock incorporated a twelve-phase power delivery system powered by eight plus four pin power connectors. It’s the only board in the roundup to feature eight SATA connectors. It manages to pack in three M.2 slots, one of which features a large heatsink, though due to PCIe lane restrictions not all SATA and M.2 ports can be run at the same time.
The rear I/O is well equipped with 802.11ac Wi-Fi built in. There’s four USB 3.0 ports, and four 3.1 ports, one of which is a Type-C. We have Intel’s Gigabit I211AT and I219V controllers powering the two LAN ports onboard. There’s HDMI and DisplayPort present, a PS/2 port, CMOS clear button and audio ports with S/PDIF.
The Z390 Taichi BIOS is all but unchanged from the Z370 version, and why would you need to change it? ASRock continues to produce one of the easier to navigate BIOS layouts on the market.
The Z390 platform, being an evolution of Z370, which is in turn an evolution of Z270 and so on, means that the platform is well and truly mature. Using relative performance to differentiate between boards is almost irrelevant given the tiny differences we saw. The Taichi’s CPU, graphics, memory and storage performance is right where we expect it to be.
OC with the Taichi was dead easy. Our 9700K sample is cooling limited above 1.35v and so the motherboard itself was not a limiting factor. The Taichi was easily able to handle full load at 5.1GHz at 1.35v with the memory overclocked to DDR4-3866. It was nice to see a ‘ budget’ board perform as well as those costing as lot more.
The reputation of the ASRock Taichi series continues to be enhanced. It looks good and has a core feature set that mostly matches the higher end boards. Overclocking and performance numbers are dead on what we expect from a now mature platform. If you’re on a budget, and wish to divert some extra dollars towards a bigger SSD or better GPU, then the Z390 Taichi should definitely be on your radar.