Introduction

We begin our foray into the AMD Threadripper platform with a rather small board product, something one might not expect to be available for AMD's Threadripper platform. ASRock's X399M Taichi takes everything the platform natively offers and fits all that into the mATX platform, so you can get all those cores in a box working on your desk without giving up a good portion of your desk space.

ASRock launched their Taichi series several iterations ago, releasing a highly refined and purposefully "mainstream" tuned series of boards that offer all the features a platform has to offer, along with robust power delivery and a simple aesthetic that is easy on the eye. As the name implies, the ASRock Taichi boards truly seek to make your computing experience a calming one by also bringing in a BIOS that is ready for most popular memory and drive options to ensure things like compatibility problems are almost completely relegated to the past.

Doing this is quite the statement from any board maker; ASRock really took some risks in heading in this direction, yet as they have proven over the years, their engineering team is one of the best, and when it comes to highly specialized motherboards, nobody can hold a candle to what ASRock has offered time and again. The ASRock X399M Taichi keeps that spirit alive by shrinking what AMD's crazy 32-thread Threadripper 1950X offers into this small mATX package, and here, only a few PCIe slots are missing (as dictated by the platform).

Specifications