While ASRock is a relatively new player in the graphics card market, they have lots of experience in manufacturing topnotch motherboards, and their graphics cards are making huge progress, too. Today, we're reviewing the ASRock Radeon RX 5700 XT Taichi OC+, which is the strongest RX 5700 Series model from ASRock. It is built around a strong triple-slot, triple-fan thermal solution with a large overclock out of the box. Rated at up to 2025 MHz Boost, we measured an average gaming clock frequency of 1996 MHz, which is almost 100 MHz higher than the AMD Reference, or 4%. This makes the ASRock Taichi the fastest RX 5700 XT custom-design we've tested so far—the differences between cards are small, though, and in the single digit percent range. At 1440p, AMD's Radeon VII flagship is only 4% faster than the Taichi, and the RTX 2070 Super is 7% ahead. Compared to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070, the ASRock card delivers 5% higher FPS. NVIDIA's recently released RTX 2060 Super is 9% behind, and the difference to the RX 5700 is 15%. With these performance results, we can definitely recommend the RX 5700 XT for maximum details gaming at 1440p resolution, or high-refresh-rate gaming at 1080p.

ASRock's cooler definitely introduces a fresh new look to the company's lineup, and it also has adjustable RGB effects that can be synchronized with your ASRock motherboard because both use the same controlling software. If your favorite RGB color is "off", it is just a button switch away. I actually like this approach very much since it's easily accessible—you don't have to install any software to turn off the lighting, which shouldn't have added much to the manufacturing cost, either. With 78°C, temperatures of the Taichi are much better than the AMD reference, but not as low as on some other custom designs. The key difference here seems to be power consumption, which ASRock has dialed up quite high to reach their advertised clocks. Guess that's the price to pay for having the fastest RX 5700 XT. Higher power means more heat the cooler has to get rid of, which usually results in higher fan speeds, too. While significantly quieter than the AMD reference design at 39 dBA, the Taichi isn't nearly as quiet as competing cards. Like most other vendors, ASRock includes a dual-BIOS feature with a quiet BIOS preinstalled. When the quiet BIOS is activated, the card runs a more conservative fan curve with lower clocks and power limit. This definitely helps as the temperature drops down to 75°C. However, it looks like the fan profile isn't fully optimized to make the best use of that thermal headroom. With 36 dBA, the quiet BIOS isn't that much quieter than the default BIOS, and not nearly as quiet as some other RX 5700 XTs which allow for higher GPU temperature to achievese lower noise levels. ASRock does include the almost mandatory idle-fan-stop capability on their Taichi, so you can enjoy the perfect noise-free experience during idle, desktop work, Internet browsing, and light gaming.

As mentioned before, gaming power draw is high, higher than what we've seen on other custom designs. It seems in order to achieve stability at their high out-of-the-box clocks, ASRock has bumped up the power limit quite a bit, and possibly voltage, too. While the AMD reference used around 220 W in gaming, the Taichi clocks in at around 275 W with peaks almost hitting 300 W. You get a few percent more performance in return, but overall, the loss in power efficiency is significant, bringing the card down by 20%, which isn't far from Vega efficiency levels. While I'm sure power cost won't matter to many, the increased heat output affects thermals and noise because the cooler has to get rid of the excess heat.

Overclocking our sample reached one of the highest GPU frequencies we've ever seen on a Navi card. What's interesting here is that the ASRock card achieved the best OC'd performance of all cards even though its overclocking ended up a few MHz lower than the leaders. Unlike the AMD reference, memory overclocking worked correctly now, but ends up limited by the adjustment range in Wattman, which tops out at 1900 MHz. Let's hope AMD reconsiders putting artificial OC limits into their driver. After manual overclocking, we gained 3.3% in real-life performance—you have to consider that this card is already highly overclocked out of the box.

What is definitely worth mentioning is that ASRock has increased the monitor output count from four to six. This makes the Taichi one of only a dozen or so decent graphics cards that have enough power for serious gaming and support plenty of monitor connectivity. With four DisplayPort connectors and two HDMI outputs on top, you're ready for anything.

On the topic of raytracing, I'm sure you've already made up your mind on whether it's something you're interested in or not, but I don't doubt for a second that NVIDIA is pushing the technology very hard with their excellent developer relations, and it looks like the adoption rate is improving. We're also hearing rumors that next-gen consoles will feature some sort of raytracing technology, too. I'd say, it's not a big deal for the near future, but it could become relevant in the years to come, so if you're future-proofing for many years to come, this could be a factor. My recommendation is not to worry about the future too much and look at what you need today to buy a new card when you need it, selling the old one to offset the cost.

The ASRock RX 5700 Taichi OC+ is already shipping and currently listed for $480 online, which is a $80 premium over the AMD reference RX 5700 XT—a little bit expensive, I think. The out-of-the-box performance increase of 4% can justify a $20 bump, and the better cooler and idle fan stop should be worth another $10. Add the RGB features and dual BIOS for another $10. This brings us to $440, which falls roughly in line with other high-end RX 5700 XT cards, like the Sapphire Nitro+ ($440), PowerColor Red Devil ($440), and MSI Gaming X ($445). Considering these competitors and ASRock's $480 price, I'm not sure if it'll be an easy sell—the additional monitor outputs are definitely a unique selling point, but the target audience is relatively small. Also, you have NVIDIA's RTX 2070 Super for $20 more, which is 7% faster and definitely worth considering at that price point.