The ASRock Z370 Taichi has almost all the required things to make it perfect, but then it kind of falls flat on its face a few times as it rushes into your arms. It does, however, manage to get up every time.

These are truly the early days for this board right now, so some compatibility issues are to be expected, especially when there have been so many boards launched this year. However, in the past, ASRock's Taichi boards have been those perfect boards that work incredibly well every time and yet that is not the case this time around, unfortunately. The first shortcoming is the rear I/O panel that doesn't provide enough USB ports for me personally. If you buy the right case with like four USB 3.0 front-panel plugs, you'll be alright. My test bench only has two, of course. Easier fan controls within the OS would be nice too, but I could have most definitely done without two LAN ports here for some more USB instead.

There are good parts to this board, however. It's got fantastic audio on the rear panel and an excellent M.2 layout that allows you to use three drives without any issues (NVME, SATA and Optane all at the same time), a decent VRM that can push more power than you're going to need, and a simple, almost LED-free aesthetic to keep the ASRock Z370 Taichi from burning holes into your eyes through the fan's ventilation holes or your case window. The slot layout is good for multi-GPU use if you're into that, too, although you might want to bring your own fan controller if you're going to go crazy with custom watercooling. If you're lucky and happen to have a CPU that can do 5 GHz 24/7, this board is ready, but just make sure you get that perfect RAM kit to match to make that process all that much easier. I am not sure you need dual LAN controllers on a mainstream platform, but if you do, you got that here too, and hey, both Intel-branded ones, so those of you particular about all of that can breathe a sigh of relief.