ASRock X399 Taichi review - Introduction

ASRock X399 Taichi
A long, single-edged samurai sword with a slightly curved blade, worn slung from the belt.

In this review we take a look at the ASRock X399 Taichi. This stylish AMD Ryzen Threadripper motherboard is available foe 349 USD / 369 Euros and might be an attractive offer for the sheer amount of sweetness you receive in return.

Threadripper  processors do not only offer many CPU cores and threads, they also offer quad channel memory compatibility as well as 64 PCI-Express Generation 3.0 lanes on the processor alone. That last fact opens up a tremendous amount of possibilities for any motherboard manufacturer, as restrictions are lifted since there is plenty of bandwidth to work with. Well, leave it up-to the motherboard manufacturer to design something intricate and tasteful, they designed a motherboard that is going completely off the chart when we talk features. Triple M2 SSDs (full x4 PCie gen 3), a U2 connector, how about eight DIMM channels. You will spot many PCIE connectors, USB 3.1 ports as well as an abundance of storage options. This 16 cores and 32 threaded Threadripper ready motherboard shows once again that massive SP3/TR4 slot.

In this motherboard you will spot three locations for M2 SSDs combined with audio based upon a Realtek ALC 1220 and TI NE5532 Premium Headset Amplifier. ASRock is embedding a 2 x GigaLAN Intel I211AT into the board and sure, a bit of RGB LEDs as well (albeit very subtle). The CPU can be powered by 8+4 pin power connectors. The board has four PCI-Express x16 slots and an array of OC buttons as well as a diagnostic POST LED. Since X399 will bring support of up-to 64 PCIe Gen3 lanes bringing anything and everything multi-GPU support multi-GPU into play, including full-on quad GPU support, the spacing on the mobo does support it. Unfortunately ASRock did not implement any Aquantia AQC-107 LAN chip can be spotted, a bit of a miss for such a high-end product, you do get 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac + BT4.2 Wireless Ethernet, however a rather poor implementation of it, we'll show you that in the review. You'll spot a nice design familiar to that Tachi design. The X399 board is among the cheaper ones available listed at € 369,- / 349 USD.

Let's head onwards into the review shall we?