ASRock X870E Taichi Motherboard Review

TweakTown's Rating: 93%

The Bottom Line

A powerful design, solid feature set and a competitive price combine to make the ASRock X870E Taichi a compelling and future looking option.

Pros

• Strong VRM and cooling
• Competitive price
• Four M.2 plus six SATA
• Lovely design

Cons

• Only one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot
• Only two PCIe expansion slots

Should you buy it?

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Buy at Newegg for $449.99 USD

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

ASRock's Taichi brand has evolved. When it made its debut several years ago, the motherboard industry was all about gaming gaming gaming, and Taichi motherboards were a refreshing alternative to some of the flashy designs of the time.

ASRock has elevated the brand over the years. Other than limited edition Aqua models, Taichi motherboards are ASRock's flagship options. They feature a premium aesthetic, but like the original Taichi's, modern variants still offer excellent value for money with little compromise regarding feature sets.

Like all X870 and X870E motherboards, the ASRock X870E Taichi is an evolutionary update over X670 predecessors. It introduces features for 2024 and beyond, including USB4 and Wi-Fi 7. In addition, there are many ease-of-use improvements, native support for Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, memory improvements, and ongoing socket support from AMD. X870 boards are certainly premium motherboards.

The ASRock X870E Taichi is a lovely-looking board with a powerful VRM, dual PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, four memory slots, four M.2 slots, Wi-Fi 7, 5G LAN, and a pair of USB 4 ports with a large number of USB 3.x ports. It's got six SATA ports, too, so it's got a lot of all-around expansion potential.

The ASRock X870E Taichi carries a recommended retail price of $449.

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Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The ASRock X870E Taichi comes in a black glittery box. Just by looking at it, you wouldn't know you've just bought ASRock's best X870E motherboard (to date).

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The rear of the box showcases the board's key features, along with a comprehensive specification rundown and a look at the rear I/O. ASRock highlights the Taichi's strong VRM in particular.

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The X870E Taichi's bundled accessories are mostly adequate. The Wi-Fi antenna comes with a sticky pad on the bottom to keep it standing upright. You get four SATA cables and three thermistor cables for measuring the temperatures of anything you wish to attach them to. There's a Taichi keycap and case badge, too, if you want to give your rig and keyboard some ASRock flavor.

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A 3-in-1 ARGB splitter cable could be helpful for those owning triple ARGB fan cases.

The Taichi includes a quick start and regulatory notices, but there's no manual or flash drive. It's far from a deal breaker, but a good old-fashioned physical manual is still desirable for quick reference. The Realtek LAN controller should be detected by Windows automatically, so it'll be easy to visit the ASRock website to grab the drivers and information you need.

Motherboard Overview

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The X870E Taichi is an EATX offering, so you'll need to make sure your case can accommodate it.

It features a rather busy but very attractive design, with some mirror-like finishes, brushed aluminum, and - by 2024 standards - quite a lot of onboard ARGB, particularly atop the rear I/O area.

Lovers of ARGB will be pleased to note there are three more ARGB headers and a single RGB header. If you use the included 3-in-1 splitter, you might get away without needing an additional ARGB controller, assuming you use an AIO cooler that should come with a splitter or daisy chain capability, too.

Now is a good time to mention that ASRock has released the X870E Taichi Lite, which is $50 cheaper. It eschews the Taichi's fancier elements and flourishes while maintaining all of its features.

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The X870E Taichi has a wide array of onboard headers, buttons, and switches. It has eight fan 4-pin headers, power and reset buttons, a debug LED readout, and, interestingly, three thermistor headers for use with the bundled cables.

The USB header complement will provide up to four additional USB 2.0 ports, four 5Gbps ports, and a welcome Type-C 20Gbps port.

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Four DIMM slots support speeds of up to DDR5-8200+ in a dual-channel single-rank configuration, a good step up from the X670E's support for up to DDR5-7800. In total, the board will support up to 256GB of memory.

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Storage-wise, the X870E Taichi includes four M.2 slots, one of which supports PCIe 5.0. The other three slots are connected to the chipset and support PCIe 4.0. Six SATA ports join the four M.2 slots. The ability to run up to ten drives makes the X870E Taichi a good option for users requiring a lot of storage potential.

The primary M2_1 PCIe 5.0 slot above the topmost expansion slot and the M2_2 secondary slot next to the memory slots have their own easily detachable heatsinks, while the remaining two are cooled by a plate attached with screws.

There are two expansion slots capable of PCIe 5.0 x16 or x8/x8.

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The X870E Taichi features a powerful VRM, which is among the strongest you will see on any X870E motherboard. It's a 24+2+12 design with 110A stages. Frankly, it's overkill given the power demands of Ryzen processors, but it's better to be over-spec than under. Even if future X3D and Zen 6 processors take a big step up in power consumption, the X870E Taichi won't have any issue powering them.

The X870E Taichi's VRM cooling is the best of the X870 boards we've reviewed so far. The large finned cooling blocks are connected via a heatpipe, and the larger section adjacent to the rear I/O comes with a small embedded fan. Luckily, it was completely unobtrusive during our testing.

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The X870E Taichi's rear I/O panel contains everything we'd reasonably expect of a board in this price range. The USB complement begins with dual USB4 Type-C ports with DP support. These are joined by five 10Gbps ports, three 5Gbps ports, and a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

The yellow-colored USB ports are what ASRock refers to as Lightning Gaming ports. These have their own interfaces, which aim to reduce latency and jitter. The Ultra USB Power ports support PD 3.0 and provide up to 15W of charging capability.

A Realtek RTL8126 controller controls the single 5G LAN port. Like all X870 boards, it includes Wi-Fi 7, offering a 160MHz connection, and Bluetooth 5.4.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports and S/PDIF. These are driven by a Realtek ALC4082 codec. ASRock includes a good-quality ESS SABRE9219 DAC and WIMA capacitors.

Finally, we have a single HDMI 2.1 port, a CMOS clear button, and a BIOS flashback button. The latter means you'll be able to install a future X3D chip and, more than likely, a Zen 6 CPU without needing to update the BIOS with a currently available chip.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

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The ASRock X870E Taichi BIOS will be familiar to anyone who's poked around an ASRock BIOS in recent years. It keeps things simple, with few graphical flourishes, instead focusing on simple and easy-to-navigate text menus.

While functional, the fan control page could probably use an update, though.

Test System

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X - Buy from Amazon
• GPU: MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: G.Skill Trident Z Neo RGB 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL30 - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL360 Flux - Buy from Amazon
• OS Storage: Teamgroup T-Force Z540 2TB - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Super Flower Leadex Titanium 850W - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro - Buy from Amazon

Benchmarks - Rendering and Encoding

Cinebench 2024

Cinebench 2024 is the latest version of Maxon's reliable and frequently used benchmark that measures single and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates and a BIOS that includes AGESA 1.2.0.2, which features improved inter-core latency for AMD Ryzen 9000 series processors.

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The X870E Taichi performed as expected, with a result of 2,277 in the nT test and 137 in the 1T test.

Blender

A rendering application like Blender is just one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU like a Ryzen 9 9950X. We use the Whitelands demo file and record how long it takes to render the image.

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The X870E Taichi was just a tiny bit behind, but three seconds over seven minutes is well within a margin of error.

Handbrake

Handbrake is a simple-to-use video encoding and transcoding application. Here, we convert a 4K movie trailer to 1080p. The results below show the average FPS, where a higher result means the task will take less time to complete.

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The ASRock came in a little behind, but when a 2% gap covers the field, it's not a cause for concern.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory latency

7Zip

7Zip is a commonly used free file compression and decompression app. It's very sensitive to changes in memory speed and latency and scales with the number of CPU threads.

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A result of 224.65 BIPS puts the X870E Taichi in the middle of the pack.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency is an area that currently favors Intel. AMD's chiplet architecture and the Infinity Fabric link inevitably add some latency compared to Intel's monolithic chips. The real-world benefits aren't that important, though.

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The differences between the tested boards are within a margin of error.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

We'd love to use our PCs purely for leisure, but some of us have to work, too! The PCMark 10 productivity test performs a series of tests using office productivity applications.

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Ultimately, all the test boards are within a fraction of each other.

3DMark Storage

UL's newest 3DMark SSD Gaming Test is the most comprehensive SSD gaming test ever devised. It is superior to testing against games themselves because, as a trace, it is much more consistent than variations that will occur between runs of the actual game. This test is the same as running the actual game without the inconsistencies inherent in application testing.

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There's a small gap between the X870 boards, including the X870E Taichi and the X670E Taichi. It may be that post-release BIOS updates can extract that last percentage point or two of X870 SSD performance.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

Time Spy Extreme is losing favor as a graphics benchmark in favor of Speed Way and Steel Nomad, but its CPU test is still a good measure of multi-core performance.

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The differences between the boards are minor.

Benchmarks - Gaming

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is brutal on graphics cards, but when things like ray tracing are removed, it becomes more sensitive to CPU and memory performance differences.

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The RTX 4070 Ti Super, as used in our test system, is not the best for highlighting gaming performance differences, so the results between the tested boards are close. The ASRock 870E Taichi's dip in minimum FPS surely affected the average result.

Horizon Zero Dawn

When using the 'favor performance' preset, Horizon Zero Dawn can achieve high frame rates with powerful graphics cards.

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The differences here are, again, minimal.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing features, and variable rate shading, among other things. Still, with a powerful graphics card, it is affected by CPU and memory performance at 1080p, though less so with a card like the RTX 4070 Ti Super.

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All the tested motherboards performed essentially identically.

VRM and SSD Temperatures

These tests are performed to show off the differences between each motherboard's cooling assemblies. In the case of VRM testing, each board is subjected to a 20-minute Cinebench loop, while the SSD test records the peak temperature recorded during the lengthy 3DMark Storage test.

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This result shows off the quality of the X870E Taichi's VRM heatsink. It's clearly superior to the other X870 boards tested to date.

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The SSD test returned another strong result for the X870E Taichi. Its primary SSD heatsink isn't as beefy as some high-end boards, but it's hefty enough to keep a demanding PCIe 5.0 SSD running at cool temperatures.

Final Thoughts

The ASRock X670E Taichi was a solid board with a high-end feature set and a competitive price with similar boards from competing manufacturers. The X870E Taichi follows in its footsteps.

At $449, it's an expensive proposition, but relative to competitors like the MSI MPG X870E Carbon at $499 and the GIGABYTE X870E AORUS Master at $499, that's $50 you can allocate elsewhere in your system. Feature-wise, it includes just about everything you can realistically expect in this price range. At this level, you'll have to spend a lot more to get more. You get the common X870 features like USB4 and Wi-Fi 7. But you can add to that 5G LAN, a good-quality audio solution, and an attractive design.

Its highlights include a strong VRM solution, which is more than enough to power an overclocked Ryzen 9 9950X and surely any other AM5 CPU AMD will ever release. Add to that high-quality heatsinks, and the Taichi is a board that is all set to sit at the heart of a powerful AMD system for years to come. It includes a no-frills BIOS, which suits us just fine. It includes all the options you'll need, and it's user-friendly for everyone, from a set-and-forget user to tweakers looking to extract every last drop of performance.

No motherboard is perfect, though. As the Taichi is an X870E board, an additional PCIe 5.0 SSD would be welcome, particularly given the slightly wasted potential of the secondary slot next to the memory slots. 10G LAN is always a nice addition, too, but it's up to the buyer to deem it necessary or not.

The ASRock X870E Taichi is a very competitive upper mid-range option that deserves a place on the shortlist of anyone considering building a high-performance AM5 system. Pending official confirmation from AMD, you can be safe in knowing that the X870E Taichi will happily accept future CPUs, giving you a competitive system for years to come.