Board Layout

The ASRock Z370 Taichi thankfully isn't as shiny as its box. You get the gray Taichi look with a fair number of add-on bits and such on both the front and rear of the board.


The front of the socket is wide open and free, with a careful reminder on the socket's cover telling you to make sure you have the appropriate CPU to install into this board. You get a quartet of DDR4 DIMM slots, ready to go to 4333 MHz or more... but likely not much more. That's reserved for the more expensive boards.


I was pleasantly surprised to find not just one or two M.2 slots here on the ASRock Z370 Taichi.


I found three, actually. Each is capable of both SATA 6 Gb/s and PCIe 32 Gb/s connectivity, so you can toss any type of drive in here; one of each, including an Intel Optane drive.


You get a triplet of PCIe x16 slots and a couple of PCIe x1 ports. There are a total of eight "normal" SATA 6 Gb/s plugs on the board's right edge for you to put to use if you'd rather not make use of all those M.2 ports, or if all three just aren't enough.


The board's bottom edge has a huge number of pins headers, but only one of these is a fan header, perhaps in an attempt to make up for the lack of USB ports on the rear.


Speaking of which, you'll find a meager 6 USB plugs on the rear of the ASRock Z370 Taichi. You do get audio plugs and LAN ports (yes, there's more than one) along with HDMI and DisplayPort. You do also get a Clear CMOS button, but fortunately for me, I never had to put that one to use.


Those two LAN ports are provided by Intel controllers; you get an Intel I291-V and an I211AT, of course.