The Card

ASRock came up with a completely fresh look for their Navi Taichi. While we have seen first designs of the new heatsink at Computex, it's great to see it on a finished product. The front is held in black with gray highlights. On the metal backplate you'll find some gold-colored cogwheels inserts, which add a nice bit of bling to the card. Dimensions of the card are 31.0 x 13.0 cm.


Installation requires three slots in your system.


Display connectivity options include four standard DisplayPort 1.4a and two HDMI 2.0b ports.

AMD took the opportunity to update the display controllers handling these outputs by leveraging DSC 1.2a (display stream compression), which unlocks very high resolution and refresh-rate combinations over a single cable. Among the single-cable display modes supported are 8K 60 Hz (which took two DP 1.3 cables until now), 4K 240 Hz, and 1080p as high as 360 Hz. On top of these, the outputs support HDR and 30 bpc color-depth for better color accuracy in creative applications.


The board uses two 8-pin power connectors. This input configuration is specified for up to 375 watts of power draw.


AMD's Navi generation of GPUs no longer supports CrossFire. DirectX 12 does include its own set of multi-GPU capabilities, but implementation requires game developers to put serious development time into a feature only a tiny fraction of their customers might ever use.

ASRock made good use of that area by positioning their BIOS switch feature here. The second BIOS runs at reduced fan speed for a quieter experience.


This little switch near the power connectors lets you turn off all the RGB lighting with the switch of a button. Easy to use and no software needed—this is the way it should be done.

Disassembly

ASRock is using five heatpipes and a copper base on their cooler. This piece of the cooler also provides cooling for the VRM circuitry.


Once the main heatsink is removed, a second heatsink that takes care of cooling the memory chips becomes visible.


The backplate is made out of metal and protects the card against damage during installation and handling. Note how it has some thermal pads to provide a little bit of extra cooling for GPU and memory chips.

On the next page, we dive deep into the PCB layout and VRM configuration.