The ASRock B550 Taichi is a worthy successor to the X570 Taichi in many ways: Aesthetics and features are similar, with some improvements to boot. With two extra Vcore phases, the B550 Taichi has an even more powerful VRM than its older X570 brother. While it gives up an M.2 slot and a third Gen4 PCIe slot, it also gives up the hated X570 chipset fan.

Out of the box, performance was excellent for the ASRock B550 Taichi. For CPU overclocking, I was able to achieve 4.45 GHz on all cores, which is the best B550 result I have achieved so far. Memory overclocking proved less fruitful as I only reached 3666 MHz CL16 stable with my Trident Z Neo kit. I was also unsuccessful in my tight timings test.

So the final question is whether you should buy a high-end B550 motherboard or a midrange X570 motherboard. Remember that the X570 Taichi is still available for the same price. The ASRock B550 Taichi offers more modern features, such as 2.5 Gb/s LAN; I think for most users, the newer features will win out. There is little to be gained in real-world performance from PCIe 4.0 right now, and most users still will not need more than their GPU and one PCIe 4.0 capable NVMe SSD, even after the storage and GPU markets have caught up.

The ASRock B550 Taichi is a feature-rich board that can trade blows with its X570 counterparts in most applications. Your choice will depend on which features matter most for your use case.