Asrock X570 Taichi
$499 | WWW.ASROCK.COM Asrock strives to find its inner zen.
Asrock’s Taichi brand stands out as a competitive option that doesn’t scream gaming. Taichi boards usually offer an excellent combination of useful features and affordable price. Can the X570 Taichi keep its value reputation intact with X570 pricing moving upwards?
The X570 Taichi has taken a step up in looks from the X470 Taichi. It really is lovely looking with the chipset heatsink’s gears and cogs being a nice retro analogue artistic touch. Of course there are healthy splashes of RGB around the heatsink as well as above the I/O cover and the right hand side of the board. Like the other X570 boards in the test, the VRM and cooling assembly have taken a step forward to cope with the demands of
powering the likes of the Ryzen 9 3950X 16-core monster.
Asrock has included 8 pin and 4 pin CPU power connectors mated to a high spec 14 phase power delivery system. There won’t be any worries powering a 16 core Ryzen CPUs on this board. You get eight SATA connectors and three M.2 slots. The three M.2 heat sinks are incorporated into the chipset heat sink which extends to almost the entire bottom half of the board. It’s necessary to remove the entire covering section to install the M.2 drives. It’s fiddly and inconvenient. We’d rather see the drive manufacturers consistently incorporate heat sinks instead of the kind of solution the Taichi offers.
The Taichi is is the only board in the roundup to include a HDMI port. This makes it suitable for use with a Ryzen APU. Obviously not too many users are going to buy a $500 motherboard to pair with a $200 APU, but it’s nice to have the option for IGP. What if AMD release something like a 6-core Navi equipped APU in the future? That’s something that could be seriously attractive.
The rest of the I/O is average. There’s only two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (one type-A and one Type-C) which is a little lacking compared to some of the other boards in the test. These are joined by six Gen 1 ports. The Taichi is also the only board in the test that doesn’t include 2.5G LAN. It does come with Wi-Fi 6 as we’d expect at this price, but still, 2.5G would have been nice.
The Taichi performed well in CPU and memory based tests. We used the latest BIOS which appears to have boosted CPU performance a little over the beta BIOS we first tested with. It also fixes what was very annoying chipset fan speed and noise.
Asrock’s Taichi boards usually impress us, but the X570 example doesn’t quite excite us like previous Taichi boards. It’s not bad at all but it lacks a couple of key features that we’d expect from Asrock at this price, and we aren’t fans of the fiddly M.2 installation. If it were a bit cheaper then we’d be more receptive. Still, if you’re going to stick to Wi-Fi and don’t care about having heaps of ultra-fast USB, then the savings over the higher end gaming boards makes the X570 Taichi worthy of consideration.
“It’s not bad at all but it lacks a couple of key features that we’d expect from Asrock at this price. ”