Introduction

Motherboards aimed at extreme overclockers are rare, usually premium items that are perhaps even rarer in days when CPUs are often pushed to near their limits out of the box. However, once you start using extreme forms of cooling, there's usually plenty more headroom and Intel's Core Ultra Arrow Lake CPUs have certainly proven themselves to be willing overclockers. The ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF aims to give you the best of both worlds, with the physical tools and design to be a weekend extreme cooling warrior, but happily handle gaming and content creation as well as provide the latest features and connectivity when at your desk as your daily driver.

Thanks to come clever design and layout choices, ASRock has done this with the Z890 Taichi OCF without many compromises. In fact, it has more features in some areas than some standard boards we've looked at recently. Thunderbolt 4 is here as is PCIe Gen 5 GPU and SSD support, Wi-Fi 7 and five M.2 ports, all while offering a bunch of features to make those extreme overclocking sessions go a little more smoothly.



That's not to say this is a board for anyone that's not even been into the EFI of a motherboard before, but even if you have modest cooling, many of the features on offer will make overclocking easier and more fun, while it has plenty of higher-end features to keep things moving and stable when things go sub-zero. We'll be looking at just how well ASRock strikes the balance between extreme overclocking and daily driver and whether enthusiastic overclockers will be better off looking at a standard board, such as others in ASRock's excellent Taichi series.

Specifications

Packaging and Contents

The extra accessories you'd expect on an overclocking-focussed motherboard are located on the PCB itself, so the box is sparsely populated. You get a Wi-Fi antenna, a generous four SATA ports, M.2 accessories and two 2-pin thermal probes for the two onboard thermistor headers, plus a three-way 3-pin ARGB splitter cable.



The full list of accessories includes:

• 1x Quick start guide
• 1x Wi-Fi Antenna
• 4x SATA cables
• 3-pin ARGB splitter cable
• 2x Thermistor cables
• 1x M.2 screw
• 1x M.2 standoff