ASRock's Taichi products are one of my favorites. They are very clearly designed for users just like me. They make use of all the platform's features and add nothing extra or superfluous; it's just nitty-gritty goodness that soothes the soul. The ASRock X299 Taichi definitely does this, but there are a couple ripples on the lake's surface that have left me a bit perplexed.

It doesn't matter how many times I look at this board, my eyes are always drawn to that hole under the left bank of DIMMs where some sort of component should have gone, but was never placed. In the idea of nothing you don't need, that little bit of circuitry bugs me, and in a big way. I'm not sure if it bugs me more that the hole is there or that I don't know what would have been there in the first place... but either way, it is not right.

The other little bit of trouble isn't really due to ASRock, but a bit more due to how new this platform is and how I at times just want to scratch my head. These SkyLake-X CPUs draw power like it's no one's business, and so if you want to get a bit of added clocks, or want a quiet rig at stock, you do need considerable cooling here, there can be no doubt. Drive performance is a bit underwhelming at times, but that fix could be a simple BIOS update away as it has been in the past. Those issues are 100% on Intel's shoulders though, not ASRock's. I do have to question the triple-SLI support though. Did I miss something?

When it came time to benchmark things, pushing the clocks, adding in different memory kits, and seeing how each of my CPUs scaled up and down as I played with settings in the BIOS, the ASRock X299 Taichi did its job without hesitation, and that made playing with this new platform and discovering its nuances all that much easier than it could have been, and these parts aren't even really in the retail market yet. ASRock has once again left me impressed with how well they can pull everything together and deliver a fantastic product right out of the gate.