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. While the cog and gear theme is still readily present, the implementation is vastly different, and in my opinion much nicer.

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 X299 Taichi.


The CPU socket is open enough to accommodate most coolers. ASRock has continued the trend from their recent X570 Phantom Gaming ITX of casting the rear I/O shield as part of the VRM heatsink. No longer just for show, the I/O shield adds quite a bit of mass and surface area for extra cooling capacity.


There are three M.2 slots on the ASRock X299 Taichi; one above and one below the first PCIe x16 slot, as well as another between the third and fourth PCIe x16 slots. The first two slots share one huge heatsink with the chipset, while the third slot has a separate heatsink so that a drive can be installed without removing the graphics card.


The ASRock X299 Taichi offers four PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, all encased in steel armor, as well as one PCI Express 3.0 x1 slots. The board has a total of ten SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and all are angled 90 degrees from the board.


The ASRock X299 Taichi has a decent rear I/O offering that includes Clear CMOS, 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 is a USB 3.2 Gen2x2 and supports up to 20 Gb/s of bandwidth, but a couple more USB 3.2 ports would have taken the Taichi CLX rear I/O from decent to excellent.

• 2x Antenna ports
• Clear CMOS button
• 4x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A ports
• 2x USB 2.0 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 X299 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.