Board Layout

ASRock has made a big effort to modernize their aesthetic over the past year. This started with the introduction of the Phantom Gaming family of products and has been carried over into the Taichi line. The cog and gear theme is more evident than ever, and in a much more intricate implementation.

While the PCB is a matte black, not much of it is visible. A large heatsink covers the entire bottom half of the board and features a very intricate cog and gear motif over the chipset. The rear I/O shield also features reflective gears. Attention to detail with regards to hardware design and build quality is something ASRock has long excelled at, and it shows with the TRX40 Taichi.


The CPU socket is quite crowded, as I suspect most TRX40 boards will be. Between the massive CPU socket, eight DIMM slots, and the absolutely huge VRM heatsink, there really isn't much board vendors can do to create more open space. ASRock has continued the trend from their recent X570 Phantom Gaming ITX of casting the rear I/O cover as part of the VRM heatsink. No longer just for show, the I/O cover adds quite a bit of mass and surface area for extra cooling capacity.


There are just two M.2 slots on the ASRock TRX40 Taichi; one below the first PCIe x16 slot and another between the second and third PCIe x16 slots. ASRock has separated the heatsink for the bottom slot so that the drive can be changed out without removing the GPU.


The reason for the missing slot is an altered chipset cooler design. The chipset cooler no longer has a thermal pad connecting it to the M.2 heatsink. Instead, a finned design with a heat pipe runs into the space where a third M.2 slot would fit.


Of course, there are also the four slots provided by the Hyper Quad M.2 Card included with the TRX40 Taichi.


The Hyper Quad M.2 has four slots positioned at an angle on the PCB, with a fan on the far right side of the card.


A set of four switches on the bottom can be used to manually disable a slot, and another switch near the fan cable is there for toggling the fan speed.


The ASRock TRX40 Taichi offers three PCI Express 4.0 x16 slots, all encased in steel armor, as well as one PCI Express 4.0 x1 slot. As HEDT boards go, the ASRock TRX40 Taichi's approach is pretty sparse. The sacrifice ASRock made to maintain both a robust high output VRM and a standard ATX form factor was to limit the space for PCIe slots.

The ASRock TRX40 Creator makes the opposite sacrifice: only 8 of the 90 A power stages (vs. 16) for the VRM, but with much better PCIe support. While I appreciate ASRock making these standard ATX offerings, I would love to see what the ASRock design team could do with a larger form factor, perhaps in a limited run.

The board has a total of eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, the first six are on the side angled 90 degrees from the board. The last two are along the bottom of the board, next to the POST code display.


The ASRock TRX40 Taichi has a decent rear I/O offering that includes BIOS Flashback, as well as an optical S/PDIF out port. However, I would have expected more USB options on a productivity oriented board. The Type-C port that uses USB 3.2 Gen2x2 and supports up to 20 Gb/s of bandwidth and the two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports are a good start, but four or so more USB ports of any variety would have placed the TRX40 Taichi in a much stronger position as a productivity powerhouse.

• 2x Antenna ports
• BIOS Flashback button
• 4x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports
• PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo port
• 2x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A ports
• USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C port
• 2x RJ-45 LAN port
• Optical SPDIF out port
• 5x 3.5 mm audio jacks

Networking on the ASRock TRX40 Taichi is handled by an Intel I211AT as well as a Realtek RTL8125AG for 2.5 Gb/s LAN. WiFi 6 is provided by an Intel 802.11ax module.