Board Layout

The new look ASRock has given this X299 Taichi is fantastic. It's cool and subdued, yet so obviously powerful. Changing the white for gray certainly makes a huge impact. Due to the complexity of this platform, there are little bits and bobs all over the place, both on the front and the rear of the board.


The socket area is fairly crowded, with DIMM slots flanking either side of the socket and the CPU's power cooler up top. You'll find the CPU VRM's input drivers on the rear of the board, opposite that cooler, a potential point for added airflow to help reduce overall temperatures.


ASRock claims crazily high 4400 MHz memory support for these eight DIMM slots. This board can hold a maximum of 128 GB.


You get four PCIe 3.0 x16 slots (connectivity varies bases on which CPU is installed) and a PCIe 2.0 x1 slot to stuff your devices into. There are ten SATA ports as well; eight provided by the X299 chipset, while two more are provided using an external ASMedia ASM1061 controller.


There is a triplet of M.2 ports here, all capable of PCIe 3.0 x4 links.


The board's bottom edge has most of what you want, with fan headers in just the right places.


The rear I/O panel has some USB 3.1 Gen1 and USB 3.1 Gen2 ports, Wi-Fi and dual LAN, a PS/2 port and the audio. You also get a Clear CMOS switch and a BIOS flash button, both of which are truly useful so early in a platform's release cycle. The LAN ports are both pushed via Intel controllers, although we do have two different chipsets in charge here. A picture of one is above.