Outside of its Aqua sequence of motherboards, which include exquisitely crafted monoblocks, ASRock’s Taichi model has been a essential a part of the corporate’s choices within the land of premium motherboards. The ASRock B550 Taichi sits on the prime of its product stack and options a powerful high quality function set. Some of essentially the most notable options embody a big 16-phase energy supply, eight SATA ports, twin M.2 slots, an Intel 2.5 GbE Ethernet controller, and an Intel Wi-Fi 6 interface. At $300 it comes equal in value with the X570 model, which leaves questions on the desk as to which one is definitely well worth the cash.
When AMD first launched the B550 chipset, a whole lot of fanfare was made concerning the excessive launch value of some fashions. For what has been often thought of a ‘funds’ chipset, a number of the extra premium B550 fashions price greater than a number of the X570 fashions, which featured full help for PCIe 4.Zero to add-in playing cards and the chipset. The B550 chipset has much less PCIe 4.Zero help than X570, with solely the highest full-length PCIe slot and one PCIe M.2 slot working at PCIe 4.0, whereas the remainder of the slots and chipset function at PCIe 3.0. The trade-off is downstream bandwidth from the chipset in addition to energy, as a result of the X570 requires a fan to maintain that PCIe 4.Zero chipset cool. Ultimately X570 requires ‘extra’ to be absolutely enabled than B550, so it comes as a little bit of shock when the B550 and X570 fashions sit on equal pricing.
The ASRock B550 Taichi
Even with what has been mentioned above, the ASRock B550 Taichi has all of the hallmarks of a premium AM4 mannequin with a strong array of controllers, ports, and energy supply.
Armed with its distinctive Taichi impressed design, the ASRock B550 Taichi follows a bronze and black shade scheme with three customizable RGB LED zones. ASRock has put in the B550 Taichi with a big sixteen section energy supply, which performs very nicely in our thermal testing. Unique to the ASRock vary, the B550 Taichi is the one board the place the highest two PCIe slots help a PCIe 4.Zero x8/x8 configuration – out of all different B550 boards, solely two others have this function.
Another strong advantage of the Taichi is that it features a BIOS Flashback controller which permits customers to replace the firmware and not using a CPU put in. This is beneficial for when AMD launches Ryzen 4000 and a firmware replace might be required to make use of the brand new Zen Three processors. Some of the board’s different core options embody 2.5 GbE networking, Wi-Fi 6, and a premium audio codec with an helping amplifier designed to bolster the standard of the entrance panel audio header.
After working our benchmarking suite, the ASRock B550 proved a constant and strong performer in our testing. It displayed aggressive efficiency in our system checks with sturdy energy consumption figures in all three of our energy checks, with an honest non-UEFI POST time of 20.6 seconds at default settings. In our CPU and gaming checks, the B550 Taichi carried out competitively towards different AM4 boards examined with our testbed Ryzen 7 3700X processor.
Our overclocking testing proved resourceful with a most steady overclock of 4.Three GHz with our Ryzen 7 3700X processor. Overall VDroop management was constant all through our testing, as was the efficiency in our POV-Ray benchmark testing. We noticed equally spectacular efficiency in our VRM thermal testing with the Taichi beating a number of the extra superior and rather more costly X570 fashions. This is because of a extra environment friendly energy supply design, in addition to a strong pair of heatsinks that are interconnected through a single warmth pipe for higher warmth dissipation. This is finally the rationale why, regardless of being B550, this Taichi prices the identical because the X570: higher thermals and higher energy supply.
The ASRock B550 Taichi because it stands…
