ASRock Z690 Taichi Motherboard Overview
With the Z690 Taichi ASRock has added back a lot of the gold elements. On the Z590 Taichi they really toned down the look of the board and we really were not the biggest fans. So this time around we have a mostly all black design, but the gears and accents on the board and gold, which really makes them stand out. For those wondering this is a standard ATX motherboard.
Starting with the CPU socket we have Intel’s new LGA 1700 socket, which you will find on all Z690 motherboards. Most major CPU cooler brands have offered free LGA 1700 upgrade kits so if you were upgrading from LGA 1151 or even LGA 1200 you may not need to buy a new CPU cooler.
Surrounding the CPU socket are the power delivery components. This board is making use of a 20 (19+1) power phase design with each Vcore phase providing 105A. So with 19 phases for the CPU that gives us a total of 1995A for the CPU. This means running a Core i9-12900K won’t be an issue on this board. Covering the power delivery components are two large heatsinks, which are connected by a heatpipe. The one the is closest to the rear I/O actually has a fan embedded in it. You can actually install the small included fan to the other one if you want.
The rear I/O cover on the board over-hangs one of the heatsinks and really brings the top-half of the board togehter. There is a small Taichi logo and of course we have the embedded gear. Yes it is actually a moving gear, more on that in a bit!
At the top corner of the board you’ll find two 8-pin EPS connectors. Moving over across the top of the board you’ll find two 4-pin fan headers. These are actually not for your CPU cooler, you’ll actually find those below the CPU socket.
Moving over to the memory slots we have four DDR5 DIMM slots which are metal reinforced. These slots support up to 128GB of DDR5 memory up to 6400 MHz.
Coming over to the edge of the board you’ll find two 3-pin addressable RGB headers, a 24-pin ATX power connector, USB 3.2 header, USB 3.2 gen 2×2 header, and an interesting USB 3.2 gen 1 Type-A port.
Moving down the board there is another USB 3.2 gen 1 header which is at a 90-degree angle, six SATA 6GB/s ports, and two 4-pin fan headers.
At the bottom of the board you’ll find the rest of your headers and connections. From left to right you have your HD audio headers, a clear CMOS jumper, 4-pin standard RGB header, 3-pin addressable RGB header, two 4-pin fan headers, TPM header, a USB 2.0 header, SATA port, Post code display, reset button, power button, small clear CMOS button, and your front panel headers.
As far as expansion slots on the board there are two PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slots, a single PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot, and a single PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slot. All of the x16 slots are metal reinforced. The first x16 slot is x16 electrical, while the second is x8, and the 3rd is only x4.
The bottom half of the board is basically full of heatsinks and there is a gear embedded into them. Unlike the gear on the rear I/O this gear does not move.
There are three heatsinks on the bottom half of the board. Once removed they reveal our M.2 slots. The top two slots are PCI-Express 4.0 x4 slots while the bottom slot is PCI-Express 3.0 x2 and also supports SATA M.2 drives.
Moving along to the rear I/O we have a nice integrated I/O shield which is all black and has the Taichi logo as well as a few gears on it. As far as buttons and connections from left to right we have a BIOS flashback button, WiFi antennas, HDMI, two USB 3.2 gen 2 ports, audio connections, 1G Ethernet (Intel I219V), 2.5G Ethernet (Killer E3100G), four USB 3.2 gen 1 ports, and two USB 4.0 Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports.
The back of the board is covered in an aluminum plate which not only helps with cooling but adds stability as well.
