ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard Overview
Taking a first look at the board we can see that ASRock has changed the color design up a bit from the X570 Taichi. With the X670E Taichi we have a pretty much all black design with gold accents. It is definitely a more flat design, but the board looks extremely sleek. For those wondering this is an E-ATX motherboard, so make sure it will fit in your case.
Starting with the CPU socket we have AMD’s new AM5 socket. You will notice the same AMD retention brackets on the top and bottom of the CPU socket, so older AM4 CPU coolers will work on these new motherboards. The big change of course is that Intel went from a PGA socket to an LGA socket, so the pins are actually on the socket itself. I honestly like this as I’ve accidently bent pins on a Ryzen processor before!
Surrounding the CPU socket are of course our power delivery components. ASRock is going with a 24+2+1 (CPU, SoC, memory) power phase design. Each of the Vcore phases is 105A so that means you are going to get 2520A for the CPU. So running AMD’s Ryzen 9 processors won’t be an issue at all. Covering those power delivery components are two large heatsinks, which are connected by a heatpipe that actually goes through the entire board.
ASRock has attached one of the heatsinks to the rear I/O cover and it really brings the top-half of the board together. There is an active cooling fan embedded in the larger heatsink. The I/O cover does have a nice gold accent on it, but no moving gear like we saw on the Z690 Taichi.
At the top corner of the board you’ll find two 8-pin EPS connectors. As we move over the top-edge of the board we find three 4-pin fan headers. One of these ais for your CPU fan, but I wish it would have been color-coded differently than the other fan headers.
On the right side of the board you’ll find your four DDR5 DIMM slots, which are metal-reinforced. These support up to 128GB of DDR5-6600 memory.
Right next to the memory slots is a heatsink. It is actually for an M.2 slot. This slot can fit drives up to 110mm (M.2 22110), supports PCI-Express Gen 4×4 and SATA 6.0 GBs modes and is powered by the chipset. With the heatsink remove we can see that ASRock does have pre-applied thermal tape.
Along the edge of the board you’ll find two 3-pin addressable RGB headers, your 24-pin ATX power connection a 4-pin fan header, USB 3.2 gen 2 header, USB 3.2 gen 2×2 header, and a surprising eight SATA 6GB/s ports. Four of these are powered by the chipset and four are powered by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.
At the bottom of the board you’ll find the rest of your headers and connections so from left to right you have your HD audio header, a 4-pin fan header, 4-pin standard RGB header, 3-pin addressable RGB header, two USB 2.0 headers, a USB 3.2 gen 2 header, clear CMOS jumper, POST code display, two more 4-pin fan headers, reset button, power button, and your front panel headers.
The bottom half of the board is of course characterized by heatsinks, which is all but standard these days. There are two M.2 heatsinks and then your chipset heatsink which sort of goes into another smaller heatsink. The chipset heatsink has the Taichi logo on it and some gears, but sadly they do not move. Removing the two M.2 heatsinks we find three M.2 slots which all support M.2 SSDs up to 80mm (M.2 2280). The top slot is a PCI-Express Gen5x4 slot and is powered by your CPU while the two lower slots are PCI-Express Gen4x4 slots and are powered by the chipset. Just like the other M.2 heatsinks these have pre-applied thermal tape.
As far as expansion slots go you have two PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slots which are metal reinforced. The top slot will operate at x16 speeds if you have a single card installed, but if you have two cards installed both will run at x8 speeds.
Moving to the rear I/O we have an integrated I/O shield, which is what we come to expect these days. From left to right we have a clear CMOS button, BIOS flashback button, WiFi antennas, HDMI, 2.5G Ethernet, two USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-A ports (ASRock Lightning Gaming ports), audio connections, two Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, three USB 3.2 gen 2 Type-A ports, and two USB 3.2 gen 1 ports. Both the Ethernet and WiFi are powered by Killer so they support their DoubleShot Pro technology which allows both interfaces to work at the same time.
The back of the board is covered in an aluminum plate which not only helps with cooling but adds stability as well.
