Overclocking

AMD has done wonders over the past two years to close the performance gap with Intel. The Ryzen product line has proven to be competitive, both in productivity and gaming. AMD, by necessity, has run their chips pretty much to the limit in order to close that gap, and while overclocking is an option on some Ryzen chips, they do not have the immense clock speed overhead we have come to expect from Intel over the last few years.

This is the first board I have had my Ryzen 5 2600X in to test, and I therefore cannot reliably say what this chip is capable of exactly. The ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate is a flagship board, however, and ASRock has a good track record for stable overclocking, and I expect my results will vary only slightly when testing this CPU on other boards. My goal was to get at least 100 MHz out of the chip without imposing unreasonable voltages, and the Taichi Ultimate delivered on that goal. The system was not stable at or below 1.3 V with the small clock boost, and it would not boot at 4.4 GHz with 1.35 V. Given the results others have achieved with this second generation of the Ryzen processor family, my results seem typical.

For RAM I used the same 3866 MHz G.Skill kit I have been using for all of my Intel testing, and the ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate was able to achieve admirable results. While setting the XMP profile did not produce stable results, I was able to get the system up with the RAM at 3466 MHz, which makes the ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate one of the best boards I have tested for overclocking this kit.
Overall, the ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate provided a top-notch overclocking experience with a simple BIOS interface that will let you get into the finer details if you want, and the software package is exceedingly simple to use.