Introduction

The ASRock Taichi motherboard lineup is positioned as a high-performance series designed for enthusiasts and professionals, offering robust features and premium build quality, and includes premium features for a reasonable price tag along with snazzy, eye-catching designs. This usually equates to a good balance of features, performance and value, which have certainly made boards such as the Taichi very popular, whether they've been mid-range, premium or even high-end desktop and its bold designs have even reached down to the Mini-ITX form factor too. Remember those incredible 170 mm x 170 mm X99 and X299 boards? Happy times. Anyway, ASRock recently added the "Taichi Lite" to their lineup, which is based on the full Taichi, but with some addons removed, for cost. Unlike its predecessor, the Taichi Lite has launched at the same time as the full Taichi, for $50 less, so our first discussion should be what the difference is between them.

This appears to be nothing more than a slightly tweaked array of heatsinks to cover slightly more of the PCB including the unsightly CMOS battery and RGB lighting. The PCB (which is E-ATX and 10.5 in / 26.7 cm wide), components, ports and cooling are identical so if you can live with that then both boards are otherwise extremely similar. We'd maybe have introduced more differences between the two and maybe knocked the Lite back to X870 from X870E, but ASRock clearly felt it was best to have the two boards sitting close in specifications and practically side by side in its product stack. The ASRock X870E Taichi costs $450 while the X870E Taichi Lite sits at $400, and we'll be testing the latter in future when we can offer a more detailed comparison to see if we can uncover any more differences.



The ASRock X870E Taichi is not quite the heatsink party that was the ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero, but it's still a great-looking motherboard and does offer slightly more extensive RGB lighting, which as mentioned above is one reason you'd be picking it over the lite version. The familiar cog wheels on the I/O shroud are illuminated, as is the lower half of the bottom M.2 heatsink.

ASRock has, like other manufacturers this round, beefed up its tool-free credentials, with your fingers all that are needed to install M.2 SSDs on two of the four M.2 slots, while it also has its own version of a PCIe slot release—Graphics Card EZ Release. Instead of a push-button mechanism employed by ASUS and MSI for example, here, you simply pull back a sprung locking mechanism to release your graphics card. A little less refined maybe, but achieving the same result nonetheless. There are quite a few basic features that differ here compared to other manufacturers though, such as active cooling for the VRMs by way of a horizontal fan embedded in the I/O shroud and also an M.2 port and heatsink located between the DIMM slots and 24-pin ATX connector, so plenty of things to talk about later in the review.

Specifications