With every new generation of processors and chipsets, a new series of motherboards that adopt these chipsets and technologies appears. These new motherboards usually fall into price categories – and hence, technology – dedicated to users with differing financial capabilities.
Previously, we discussed the new Ryzen 7000 chipset series, where we noted that the X670E chipsets are the most distinguished and feature-rich among the four versions. These new motherboards are designed to deliver the best in terms of performance and connectivity. They are also designed for extensive overclocking and broad support for PCI-E 5.0.
The X670E chipsets are designed to be paired with advanced hardware as they support graphics cards, and fifth-generation solid-state storage units, PCI-E Gen 5. This is something you will not find in the motherboards from the lower categories in the series.
Today, we come to you with a fantastic new generation motherboard that spares no effort in providing everything that professional gamers need, namely the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard.
Overview of the ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard
The ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard is one of the new motherboards released to support AMD’s fifth-generation Ryzen processors. This motherboard comes with a plethora of features and modern technologies that allow users to take full advantage of the capabilities of modern processors.
General Design of the Motherboard
The X670E Taichi motherboard features an elegant and distinctive design that combines black and silver and is made of high-quality materials to provide stability and durability. Numerous ports and outlets are available on the motherboard to provide access to a wide range of devices and accessories.
The X670E Taichi motherboard is known for its support for fifth-generation AMD Ryzen processors, along with support for the X670 chipset and DDR5 memory. It allows users to benefit from a range of modern technologies such as high-definition sound, Wi-Fi 6E wireless connectivity, and support for PCIe 5.0.
The motherboard also offers some unique features such as fast charging support for smart devices and super-fast Thunderbolt 4 ports.
At first glance, you’ll find that the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard comes with a very polished distinctive design. As is usually the case with Taichi products, it’s hard not to notice the clear harmony between the design and the colors, especially when ASRock refers to the Bruce Lee watermark on the product page.
The design is almost entirely black, with touches of gray, and gold for some metal parts give the board more simple yet highly effective touches.
As for flamboyance, the Taichi logo located above the chipset group and the small strip on the lower side of the board are the only two RGB elements.
Looking at the back of the board, we find a massive metal plate in front of us. It strengthens the eight-layer PCB and helps support the weight of the heat shields on the top. This, of course, without affecting the rear panel for the AM5 socket, which is still separate, meaning it can be replaced if necessary to install different CPU coolers.
Power Phases and RAM on the ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard
The new AMD processors come with support for the LGA socket, so the installation socket uses a similar mounting mechanism to that found on Intel boards. AMD has chosen to use the same mounting brackets for coolers and backplates as AM4, meaning that most AM4 coolers will be compatible with AM5 sockets.
As for the power delivery to the processor, the ASRock Taichi motherboard employs a powerful 24+2+1 power phase design rated at 105 amps. There are two 8-pin power connectors located in the upper-left part of the motherboard, easily accessible through cutouts in this area.
To maintain the temperature of the VRM voltage regulator modules and keep them under control, ASRock uses a hidden active cooling system. A fan is carefully placed beneath the cover—specifically, below the bronze Taichi sticker—enhancing airflow along the cooling fin surface.
Underneath these heatsinks, there is also a nickel-plated heatpipe bent in an S-shaped curve around the processor socket, connecting to the chipset control units and loops at the bottom of the board. This effectively links all the cooling chambers on the motherboard surface to maximize cooling performance.
On the right side of the processor socket, there are four DDR5 slots covered by metal shielding with an upper and lower latch. ASRock claims that this reinforcement provides more stable signals at higher DDR5 frequencies.
The label at the top of the memory installation guide indicates that the initial boot process (or any boot process after a direct CMOS reset) will take additional time due to memory training tests.
The Taichi officially supports DDR5-6600 speeds with XMP and EXPO profiles, and the motherboard can accommodate up to 128 GB of memory.
Storage Solutions and PCIe Expansion Slots
With the Taichi product line, ASRock mainly targets high-end gamers, so it doesn’t waste space on the board with useless x1 card slots. Instead, the focus is on supporting dual graphics card setups.
Therefore, we find two full-length reinforced slots with heat shields directly connected to the processor via PCIe 5.0 signals, which can be split between x16 or x8/x8 modes depending on the connected graphics cards.
Below these slots, four M.2 slots are concealed by heat shields on the motherboard. Above the main PCIe slot, there is a “Blazing M.2” slot that connects to the processor via PCIe 5.0 x4 lanes. Two more slots are positioned between the graphics card slots, and another is located to the right of the RAM slots. These three operate at PCIe 4.0 x4 speed through the chipset.
It’s worth noting that the M.2 slot adjacent to the RAM slot can accommodate a Type-22110 storage unit and operates in SATA mode, while all the other slots are limited to the 2280 (80mm) and smaller sizes and operate in PCIe mode.
The unfortunate thing is that Taichi has thermal pads on only one side for all the M.2 slots. However, the board comes with a heatsink for the “Blazing M.2” slot.
This cooler consists of an alternative heatsink cover with a heat sink tower and stacked cooling fins, featuring a 40mm PWM fan. The fan cable is long enough to reach any fan header on the board or fan controller.
The only downside to the “Blazing M.2” heatsink is that accessing the graphics card release latch can be difficult, especially when using a large air cooler for the CPU.
In another part of the board—specifically, the lower-right section—there are eight front-facing SATA ports. Although the X670 chipset provides enough PCIe lanes to host eight SATA ports originally, the Taichi motherboard utilizes two of the eight PCIe 3.0 lanes for Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking.
To compensate for this, the additional ASM1061 controller powers half of the SATA ports. One of these additional lanes is shared with the second M.2 slot, so only one SATA storage unit can be used at a time between these two connectors. RAID 0, 1, and 10 are supported for both NVMe and SATA drives.
Rear I/O Panel
The rear I/O panel of the motherboard features an integrated cover and includes a total of 10 USB ports, as follows:
- Eight Type-A USB ports
- Two Type-C USB ports that are USB4 capable, operating at a speed of 40 Gbps and supporting power delivery of up to 9 volts at 3 amps or 5 volts at 3 amps. These two ports are also labeled as Thunderbolt.
Moving on to the rest of the ports, we find that out of the eight Type-A USB ports, five operate at a speed of 10 Gbps. While AM5 is supposed to support all USB3 connections at 10 Gbps, ASRock runs three of them at 5 Gbps instead.
The two topmost USB ports, labeled as Lightning Gaming, are specifically designed for the mouse and keyboard. Each of them uses a separate controller unit, aiming to reduce input latency and variability.
There is also an HDMI 2.1 port along with the two aforementioned Type-C ports for display connectivity. As for audio, the Taichi features the ASRock Taichi Audio System powered by the Realtek ALC4082 encoding software with separate left and right channels on dedicated PCB layers. The front audio header utilizes SABRE9218 DAC audio capacitors and WIMA to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio of 130 dB.
The rear audio sockets include an audio output jack, a 3.5mm microphone input socket, and an optical S/PDIF connector.
ASRock incorporates Killer-branded components for networking. The E3100G controller handles Ethernet at 2.5 Gbps, while the AX1675 aggregation card provides Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity.
An external Wi-Fi antenna with a one-meter cable is included in the package. Due to its support for the 6 GHz band, the cable is thick and sturdy.
Lastly, there are buttons on the rear panel for CMOS reset and BIOS Flashback functionality.
Front Panel, RGB Ports, and Fans
A total of eight 4-pin fan connectors are available, with most of them positioned along the edges of the motherboard. If the ten USB ports on the rear panel are not sufficient for your needs, the Taichi includes an additional five USB connectors on the board.
On the front edge, between the 24-pin ATX power connector and the SATA ports, there is a front-panel Type-C header with a speed of 20 Gbps and a 3.1 Gbps connector. The other three, one 3.1 and two 2.0 headers, are located along the bottom edge. The Taichi motherboard also features a dual-port USB expansion chip for USB 2.0 connectors.
Being a premium overclocking board, the Taichi includes features suitable for this task. The power and reset buttons are located in the bottom-right corner, next to an error code display screen.
After system boot-up, the diagnostic screen switches to real-time CPU temperature display. A clear CMOS jumper is present on the left side.
Four RGB headers are available if you want to further customize the Taichi’s appearance. One four-pin header on the bottom edge is compatible with ASRock Polychrome RGB system, alongside a general addressable header.
Two additional ARGB connectors are located near the top-right corner. Finally, the audio header is at the bottom-left, as usual, and the front-panel control header is at the bottom-right.
Performance Results and Tests of the ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard
Today, we’re once again dealing with the new generation of Ryzen processors, and we’ve tested the performance of the motherboard with the latest RYZEN 7000 series processors.
As is usually the case with motherboards in general, running games and heavy applications was not a cause for concern with this motherboard. It provides you with the maximum performance possible from the latest Ryzen processors. Therefore, we won’t dwell much on the performance aspect with applications and software since there’s nothing noteworthy to mention in that regard.
Anyway, as I always say, when it comes to raw performance, motherboards don’t make much difference in your gaming or software experience. Games run as they should on the CPU and GPU without much consideration for the motherboard’s specifications.
What we care about in choosing a motherboard is the features it offers and its ability to overclock the CPU to achieve good numbers that can unleash the power of the graphics cards and the new processors.
We then proceeded to power on the system and entered the BIOS to check the frequencies of the Ryzen 9 7950X processor, which was running at its stock frequencies of 4.5 GHz without any issues. The same goes for the RAM as well, as we found that the motherboard easily reached the enhanced frequencies using EXPO technology, reaching up to 6000 MHz…
The temperatures were not excessively high either, with the processor hovering around 60 degrees, while the motherboard itself ranged between 50 and 40 degrees depending on the area we were referring to.
The great thing is that ASRock provides you with a set of useful tools for performance monitoring and control. Starting from the BIOS with its user-friendly and straightforward interface, to the A-Tuning utility, which offers general operating modes for the system.
These modes can automatically control your hardware frequencies and adjust fan speeds, among other things. You can also manually or semi-manually adjust all of these settings according to your preference.
The only issue we encountered with this X670E motherboard is that it supports NVMe PCIe 5.0 drives, for which we didn’t have any samples to test their performance. Therefore, we used a Corsair MP600 PRO XT storage unit from the previous generation, which already reached peak performance.
Final Evaluation of the ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard
Without a doubt, the ASRock X670E Taichi motherboard is a strong and suitable addition for users who want to provide high performance and modern features for their systems, especially those who want to take advantage of the AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors, X670 chipset, and DDR5 memory.
In terms of the motherboard’s design, it has been updated without any drawbacks. As for cooling, we can say that we’re facing a movable shield of cooling blocks almost everywhere. This is in addition to the high overclocking potential thanks to the 24 + 2 + 1 power stages rated at 105 amps.
All of this, along with a wide range of ports such as USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-A and Type-C, USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A and Type-C ports, Thunderbolt 4 ports, LAN ports, and high-quality audio ports, as well as multiple PCIe 5.0 slots for supporting new graphics cards and storage units.
Overall, the motherboard provides a wide array of modern features that enhance performance and stability, allowing users to easily and quickly connect a variety of devices and external accessories. However, in return, you’ll need to invest a significant amount of money.
But in the end, it’s an excellent choice for users who want to upgrade their systems and enjoy an optimal and impressive user experience without paying much attention to the price factor.
