Final Thoughts
As we come to the end here it has been fun being able to take a look at our first AMD X670E motherboard and from a platform standpoint you are getting quite a lot, even if you are upgrading from a X570 or Ryzen 5000 series system. As I mentioned in the beginning of this review the two biggest and most noticeable upgrades are DDR5 and PCI-Express 5.0. At least for our testing with DDR5 and this platform things have gone without incident, which is definitely different from when Ryzen first launched. On the PCI-Express 5.0 side of things Gen5 NVMe solid state drives are not currently available yet, but it is going to be exciting to see the speeds that we see out of those drives. I mean the Gen5x4 theoretical speed is 15754 MB/s, which is just crazy!
When it comes to ASRock’s X670E Taichi specifically this is their mainstream flagship board and with that we expect it to have all of the bells and whistles as other flagship boards. It is worth noting that ASRock does have a X670E Taichi Carrara which has a pretty sleek color design. Overall I do like this boards offering, although I do feel like 10G Ethernet is missing. At this level of board it would have been nice to get something better than 2.5G Ethernet. You do get WiFi 6E, but for those who want to plug in, 2.5G just seems limiting.
You do get everything that this new platform offers though including a PCI-Express 5.0 M.2 slot, that does come with an optional massive heatsink and active cooling fan! ASRock has also outfitted the board with three more M.2 slots (Gen4x4) so you can fully run all of your drives as M.2 drives if you want. If you did want to so some serious storage this board actually has eight SATA 6GB/s ports! Of course all of the M.2 slots have heatsinks on them so you don’t have to worry about cooling those drives and you can buy the less expensive non-heatsink versions of the latest Gen4 drives.
With this type of board you are probably gong to be running a Ryzen 9 processor and with the 24+2+1 power phase design you’ll be covered! You are getting 2520A for the CPU which is just insane so overclocking using this board will not be an issue. The VRM cooling is quite solid too and at least in our testing the active VRM fan was not loud at all. I did like that ASRock has a heatpipe which essentially goes through the entire board.
I do feel like ASRock’s motherboard companion software is quite dated, it just feels old. We’ve seen other motherboard manufacturers revamp their motherboard software and it would be nice if ASRock did the same. Also I still don’t understand why on ASRock AMD motherboards there is no “Easy” mode in the BIOS while their Intel boards have that feature. Having an easy mode, as the same suggests makes making changes in the BIOS much easier and less daunting, especially for beginners.
Right now this board is going $499.99, which puts it at the exact same price as Gigabyte’s X670E AORUS Master, but below ASUS’s ROG Crosshair offerings. I think if you are looking to build a new Ryzen 7000 system or are upgrading your current system the ASRock X670E Taichi is a solid board and one that has all brand new tech that is going to be around for a while. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard 9 out of 10 score!
Pros:
– Sleek design
– Lots of M.2 slots
– Great power design
– USB4 / Thunderbolt 4
– WiFi 6E
– Reinforced DDR5 and PCI-Express slots
Cons:
– No 10G Ethernet
– No “Easy Mode” in the BIOS
– Software seems dated
