ASRock X870 Taichi Creator Motherboard Review - The creator's Taichi

TweakTown Rating: 93%

Our Verdict

Excellent connectivity and networking features and great value for money make the ASRock X870 Taichi Creator a compelling mid-range option.

Pros

• 10G and 5G LAN
• Dual Gen 5.0 M.2 and PCIe slots
• Lots of USB ports
• Strong VRM
• Very good value

Cons

• X870 lane sharing compromises
• Dated UEFI design

Should you buy it?

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Introduction, Specifications, and Pricing

ASRock's Taichi brand has certainly evolved since it made its debut several years ago. Now, as we move into 2026, the Taichi brand has morphed into ASRock's high-end brand that caters to gamers, overclockers, and now, creators too. We have the X870 Taichi Creator in the lab for review.

One thing hasn't changed, though. With the exception of limited-edition ultra-premium boards like the Aquas, modern Taichi variants still offer great value for money with little compromise regarding feature sets.

Perhaps to keep costs down, ASRock opted to build the X870 Taichi Creator around the more affordable single X870 chipset rather than the more expensive dual X870E option. The board still manages to pack in dual LAN (10GbE and 5GbE), USB4, and plenty of USB 3.x ports, but there are some inevitable compromises when using a fully populated system. I'll get into that later.

Apart from its connectivity and networking potential, the X870 Taichi Creator features four M.2 slots, dual PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, support for 256GB of memory, front USB 20Gbps with 36W fast charge support, and a powerful VRM capable of handling the sustained loads of high TDP CPUs, including a Ryzen 9 9950X or X3D.

As is often the case with Creator-focused models, the X870 Taichi Creator features a reserved, nearly all-black design. That'll make it easy to incorporate into a wide variety of build themes. Its design is in contrast to nearly all motherboards that try to push RGB branding or logos in your face. I really like it.

The ASRock X870 Taichi Creator carries a recommended retail price of $319. Given its high-end feature set, including USB4 and 10GbE, it offers great value.

Further Socket AM5 Reading – Our Latest Reviews

• Sapphire Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 review - Welcome back to the motherboard market!
• MSI MEG X870E Godlike X Edition Review - A feature-complete flagship for the ultra enthusiast
• ASRock Phantom Gaming X870 Nova WiFi review - Delivering a solid core feature set

Best Deals: ASRock X870E Taichi Motherboard

	Today	7 days ago	30 days ago
	-	-	$329.99 USD	Buy
	-	-	$468.79 CAD	Buy
	-	-	£456	Buy
	-	-	$329.99 USD	Buy
* Prices last scanned 2/1/2026 at 3:43 pm CST - prices may be inaccurate. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. We earn affiliate commission from any Newegg or PCCG sales.

Packaging, Accessories, and Overview

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The X870 Taichi Creator comes in a study box with a glitter-like finish.

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The rear of the box highlights the board's key features, along with a detailed specification rundown and a view of the rear I/O.

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The X870 Taichi Creator comes with a fairly basic set of accessories. You get a WiFi antenna, four SATA cables, an ARGB splitter cable, and a thermistor cable.

Motherboard Overview

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The aesthetics of a motherboard (or anything for that matter) are always in the eye of the beholder, but in my opinion, the X870 Taichi Creator is a lovely-looking board. The all-black design with a splash of gold looks classy. The small acrylic plate over the chipset heatsink is also a nice touch. It's nice to see motherboards without excessive silk-screening and lines running every which way. Simple is best. A big GPU will hide it all anyway.

It's no surprise that the X870 Taichi Creator lacks onboard RGB. However, there are three ARGB headers plus a 12V RGB header. There are a total of seven fan headers located around the board, which is welcome. An AIO cooler, a GPU or two, and several toasty M.2 SSDs require a lot of cooling.

You also get a thermistor header for use with the bundled cable, power and reset buttons, and a debug LED readout.

The board includes a USB 20Gbps Type-C header with 36W charging support. I love it as it's great for charging or hotswapping a phone without reaching around to the back of a case. There are headers supporting four USB 5Gbps ports and four USB 2.0 ports. When you add those to the rear ports on the X870 Taichi Creator, it supports up to 23 USB ports.

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The board comes with four DIMM slots supporting up to 256GB of DDR5 memory. Not that anyone can afford that much unless you have a yacht these days. Speeds up to 8000 MT/s are supported, though that is probably a conservative number if the 1:2 mode is used. AMD still recommends memory in the 6000-6400 range in 1:1 mode for the best balance of speed and latency.

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The X870 Taichi Creator comes with four M.2 slots. Two of them support PCIe 5.0 x4, the third supports PCIe 4.0 x4, and the final one supports PCIe 3.0 x4. Four SATA ports join these. Perhaps an extra pair of SATA ports would be welcome on this class of board, but I think we're at the point where four is all we'll ever see on any board going forward.

There are some compromises involved when populating all of the M.2 slots. M.2_2 shares bandwidth with the USB4 ports. You can switch it to x4 in the BIOS, but doing so will disable the USB4 ports.

Additionally, the fourth M.2 slot shares bandwidth with the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. There's a strong case to be made that ASRock should have used the X870E chipset, since X870 can't run a fully populated system without compromise. Having said that, a single GPU and a couple of SSDs can run without sharing.

The two PCIe 5.0 slots support x16 or x8/x8 modes. The bottom-most PCIe x16 slot supports PCIe 3.0 devices and runs at x4 electrically.

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The primary M.2 slot is cooled by its own heatsink, with a bottom-mounted thermal pad for additional cooling. The other three are cooled by a single plate secured with screws.

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The X870 Taichi Creator features a robust VRM design with 18+2+1 90A stages. That gives you well over 1000A of current on tap, which is more than enough for any Ryzen processor and will surely be enough for future Zen 6 models as well. Though overclocking is not a focus of the board, there's plenty of headroom on tap if you want it.

The VRM heatsinks are large and easily capable of taming our Ryzen 9 9950X processor under a sustained load. We saw a peak temperature of 58 degrees. That's actually a couple of degrees higher than a couple of other ASRock X870 boards we've tested, though such variances are insignificant, and the VRM temperatures are well within the tolerances of modern VRM designs.

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The rear I/O and the connectivity it offers are definitely a highlight of the board. The USB complement is impressive. The two USB4 Type-C ports are joined by two 10Gbps ports, six 5Gbps ports, and two USB 2.0 ports. The so-called Ultra USB Power ports draw power from the 12V PSU rail, purportedly providing stable power with lower voltage droop, less jitter, and less noise. That'll make them useful for sensitive devices like DACs or microphones.

The networking complement is very good, 10G and 2.5G LAN is provided by Marvell AQ113 and Realtek 8126 controllers, respectively. The WiFi 7 duties are handled by a Realtek 8922AE add-in card, though it only supports 160MHz connections. 320MHz is becoming more common, and ASRock likely chose this over a 320MHz controller for cost reasons.

Next are the audio ports, which consist of 3.5mm line-in and line-out ports, as well as S/PDIF. A Realtek ALC4082 codec drives these.

Finally, we have a BIOS flashback button, a CMOS clear button, and an HDMI 2.1 port. I like to see HDMI on this class of board as it allows users to dedicate a GPU to compute or AI applications.

UEFI, Software and Test System

UEFI

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The X870 Creator WiFi BIOS is all but identical in layout to all other ASRock X870 boards, with some color tweaks depending on the individual board and series. It's easy to navigate, particularly for anyone who's used an ASRock board in recent years. The problem is that competitors have rolled out refreshed designs, while ASRock's BIOS looks dated.

A common complaint I have is the design of the fan-tastic control page. It really looks like it hasn't been touched in a decade, and it wouldn't look out of place on a board from the pre-UEFI era. Hopefully, ASRock takes the opportunity to overhaul it when it releases next-gen motherboards. Having said that, it does work, and as a mostly set-and-forget type of page, it's not a deal breaker.

A visit to the ASRock website will give you options to download software such as the ASRock motherboard control utility and Polychrome RGB control software. The Nahimic audio software might be worth a look, too. There's also an option to download Norton 360 for Gamers (if you really must).

All the board's drivers are available, too, though it's worth checking the relevant websites for newer versions of the chipset, networking, and integrated graphics drivers.

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 a reliable, widely used benchmark that measures both single- and multi-threaded performance. Note that all our benchmark testing used the latest available Windows updates.

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A result of 2,287 in the nT test and 137 in the 1T test isn't stunning, but it's also nothing to complain about.

Blender

High performance in a rendering application like Blender is one of many reasons a user will consider a high-core-count CPU. We use the Whitelands demo file to record the time it takes to render the image.

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Visually, the X870 Creator isn't a stunner here, but a handful of seconds over the course of a test that takes over seven minutes is insignificant.

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; higher values indicate the task will take less time to complete.

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Handbrake relies far more on the CPU and memory than the motherboard. It's stating the obvious, but it isn't the fastest or the slowest in this test.

Benchmarks - File Compression and Memory Latency

7Zip

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

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A result of 228.13 BIPS in this memory-sensitive benchmark puts the X870 Taichi Creator in the mid-pack.

AIDA64 Memory Latency

Memory latency has traditionally favored Intel and its monolithic designs. A nanosecond or two here or there is not noticeable, but larger numbers, especially when the memory is frequently accessed, will result in more undesirable, cumulative idle cycles.

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It seems the Taichi Creator's memory performance is just a tiny bit behind the fastest boards. It's important not to overstate this, though. The real-world differences really are minimal. Rogue Windows background processes or a memory-hogging app on a daily driver system will have a greater impact on performance.

Benchmarks - PCMark and 3DMark

PCMark 10 Productivity

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

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A score of 13,308 falls within the expected range for this test.

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.

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This is a good result for the X870 Taichi Creator.

3DMark Time Spy Extreme

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

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It's another mid-pack result for the X870 Taichi Creator.

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 tested boards all deliver near-identical results in this GPU-limited game.

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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Here's another decent gaming result, even though the margins between all the boards are small.

Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition

Metro Exodus received an update that added improved DLSS support, enhanced ray tracing, and variable rate shading, among other features. 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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Even though the margins are again small, the X870 Taichi Creator is a solid motherboard for gamers, though relatively few will buy it for a dedicated gaming system.

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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The X870 Taichi Creator's large VRM heatsinks keep temperatures under control, which is particularly important for a board expected to run a high-core-count CPU under load for extended periods.

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The X870 Taichi Creator is yet another ASRock 800 series board that performs well in this test thanks to the large surface area of its primary M.2 heatsink.

Final Thoughts

The ASRock X870 Taichi Creator offers a solid feature set for its $320 price. You get 10G and 5G LAN, WiFi 7, USB4, dual PCIe 5.0 M.2 slots, and dual PCIe slots. It's also got a capable VRM with good cooling and a lovely, understated look.

On the downside, I would like to see boards in this class with 6 SATA ports. Maybe I'm flogging a dead horse there, though. SATA just isn't that important to manufacturers, even though mechanical hard drives and SATA SSDs still serve an important role for mass storage. There are also some compromises forced by using the X870 chipset instead of the X870E. It's something to be aware of if you intend to build a fully populated system.

I've also been critical of ASRock's UEFI, which could really use a graphical overhaul. Its functionality is fine, but it looks dated, particularly the fan control page, which looks poor.

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Performance-wise, the board doesn't really stand out, but the truth is the motherboard makes little difference in benchmark tests when all other components are equal.

But this is a board you buy for its strong feature set, build quality, and value for money. Creators needing excellent connectivity options, lots of fast USB ports, including USB4, and care little for flashy looks and RGB lighting will find plenty to like in the X870 Taichi Creator.