The Board - A Closer Look

ASRock's engineering team made sure the X99 Taichi has everything you might need. That starts with a dual-BIOS implementation with a switch to swap between BIOSes at the board's bottom edge and the two BIOS chips and a header to clear CMOS settings.


There are also a dual-digit POST display on the board's lower-right corner to help with diagnosing boot issues and a very capable Nuvoton Super I/O chip for monitoring and fan-control duties.


Audio gets ASRock's Purity Sound treatment added on top of the Realtek ALC1150 audio CODEC which features a fair amount of electrical separation from the rest of the board.


The VRM cooler and PCH cooler are large chunks of metal that do a great job of keeping the components they cover cool.


Even the DIMM power is nicely designed, with both banks featuring dual-phase power designs to help you push your memory to those ultra-high 3200 MHz clocks.


Finally, there is an ASMedia USB hub on the board's upper left to aid with USB support, alongside a specialized header ready for you to plug in an AIO liquid cooler's pump wire.