ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate

[Black Haru]

The second generation of AMD Ryzen CPUs have hit the market, and with them comes a wave of new motherboards. The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate aims at a top spot among them. Has ASRock brought enough to the table to make this board the Ultimate?

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[xkm1948]

4.3GHz stable on a 2600X? Wow that is pretty sweet for this mobo to achieve while doing a 3466 RAM! I thought most RyZen 2 stops at 4.2GHz and 3200 RAM.

 

[TheLostSwede]

You might want to consider the fact that most Aquantia AQC-107 based cards retail for around $100, which makes the overall board price a lot more reasonable. Obviously ASRock isn't pay that much, but I doubt they get them for free either...

I'm curious though, what are the limits in terms of what works at the same time, as the AQC-107 and both M.2 slots shouldn't be usable at the same time, or is there a PCIe switch/splitter on the board?

 

[RH92]

I would advise to anyone considering buying this board or any other AM4 board from Asrock to seriously take a look at their forums !

Asrock has great hardware but their software is one of the worst : bios updates take ages to come and sometimes bring more issues than they do fix , new AGESA features poorly implemented , poor memory compatibility / timmings , Pstate OC not working properly , you named it .

 

[R-T-B]

Asrock has great hardware but their software is one of the worst : bios updates take ages to come and sometimes bring more issues than they do fix , new AGESA features poorly implemented , poor memory compatibility / timmings , Pstate OC not working properly , you named it .

AGESA in general is a mess, mostly because it's something kinda new.

Short of ASUS, ASRock was actually second place in my standings of keeping up with AGESA's and having bioses that worked, when I was the "AMD BIOS monitor" for TPU.

 

[RH92]

AGESA in general is a mess, mostly because it's something kinda new.

Short of ASUS, ASRock was actually second place in my standings of keeping up with AGESA's and having bioses that worked, when I was the "AMD BIOS monitor" for TPU.

AGESA might be a ''mess'' but there are certainly some board manufacturers dealing way better with this ''mess'' than others do . As you said ASUS has done a prety decent job .

As an Asrock owner i can tell for sure that it's been a HUGE mess lately with their different bios versions to the point where Asrock customers run way older bios versions for the sake of stability .
Also from the look of it MSI and especialy Gigabyte have steped up their game in this departement . When all the other big manufacturers except Asrock have the latest AGESA in their bios and improve memory support bios after bios , well i can only blame Asrock for it .

 

[R-T-B]

As an Asrock owner i can tell for sure that it's been a HUGE mess lately with their different bios versions to the point where Asrock customers run way older bios versions for the sake of stability .

Not saying your wrong, but it certainly took a turn for the worse then from when I was reviewing these things in late 2017. All I can say now is I no longer have the stuff to test it out.

Also from the look of it MSI and especialy Gigabyte have steped up their game in this departement .

I hope GIGABYTE has, because their initial releases were absolutely abysmal, only worse one was BIOSTAR.

 

[newtekie1]

I'm curious though, what are the limits in terms of what works at the same time, as the AQC-107 and both M.2 slots shouldn't be usable at the same time, or is there a PCIe switch/splitter on the board?

According to the AsRock spec's page, the 3rd PCI-E x16 slot(electrically PCI-E 2.0 x4) is shared with the second M.2 slot. So the AQC-107 probably has a dedicated PCI-E lane or lanes provided to it.

 

[_UV_]

AGESA in general is a mess, mostly because it's something kinda new.

Actualy not. AGESA here since around 2008

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGESA
Linked page in russian, english variant have less refferences

AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) Interface Specification for Arch2008 Январь 2017

or even since 2006 according to this
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Generic_Encapsulated_Software_Architecture

 

[R-T-B]

Actualy not. AGESA here since around 2008

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGESA
Linked page in russian, english variant have less refferences

AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) Interface Specification for Arch2008 Январь 2017

or even since 2006 according to this
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Generic_Encapsulated_Software_Architecture

Not the new Ryzen builds of it. I should have clarified. AGESA in general is just a packaging format AMD uses for their core UEFI stuff.

 

[Caring1]

FYI, if you want to save some money and don't need 10Gb Ethernet capability, get the next version down (X470 Taichi) as it has the same feature set at a lower price.

 

[_UV_]

save some money and don't need 10Gb Ethernet capability

when i bought my Z77 board with WiFi i had no plans to use wireless connection at all, but 2 years later it became my main connection, so having some futureproof isn't bad
IMO most important decision factor - drivers support and overall "quality" of this 10GE
in my local store for example, price difference for 2 models is 50$ (335 and 285), and Intel add-in card for 1GE costs around 60 and same goes for used 10GE from cheap brands

 

[Mighty-Lu-Bu]

Is there a reason why you guys have only reviewed one X470 board when there are about 10+ that are out there?

Please, please, please, please review more, especially the Asus offerings!

 

[_UV_]

I please review more, especially the Asus offerings!

As for Asus, inspection (by reviews photos) of C7 Hero shows that is a mixture of C6 Extreme VRM and C6 Hero rest, less expensive ones IMO too cheap made to buy especially if you on a budget
(we not so rich to buy cheap things)

 

[Mighty-Lu-Bu]

Please do a review of the Asus ROG Strix X470 F Gaming- it is looking like this is probably the best X470 offering as of right now due to features and its price.

 

[gunbuster]

I would advise to anyone considering buying this board or any other AM4 board from Asrock to seriously take a look at their forums !

Asrock has great hardware but their software is one of the worst : bios updates take ages to come and sometimes bring more issues than they do fix , new AGESA features poorly implemented , poor memory compatibility / timmings , Pstate OC not working properly , you named it .

Have to agree on this. Bought a Z270 Taichi based on the hardware features and Asrock abandoned it right quick. Software is all from 2017. No updates. Doubt I'll ever see another BIOS... Will stick with Asus next time.

Not to mention I had to RMA my first Taichi because it was DOA.

 

[Fabiano]

Their hardware might be good but their bios team is just really B A D.
FIY they can't even have a fix the basics like a proper "SAVE PROFILE" function that can actually save things on their now more than one year old X370 Taichi. The same board that still uses hexadecimal numbers for memory timings. The same board that doesn't have a functional clockgenerator. The same board have memory badwidth losses up to 20% if manual overclocking is in use.
I understand every company is limited on resources but AsRock is just REALLY BAD at supporting their boards.

What is worth a great motherboard with a crap bios ? AVOID ASROCK

http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=8668&title=x370-taichi-great-hardware-toxic-support
https://www.overclock.net/forum/27481658-post3765.html