ASRock X370 Taichi AM4 Motherboard Review

Test Setup

ASRock X370 Taichi – BIOS 2.20
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Corsair LPX 2666MHz
Corsair LPX 3000MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H110i GT
Corsair ML Fans

Overclocking

As we said on the BIOS page, the fact ASRock have gone a bit old school in their approach to the Taichi is either fantastic or frustrating depending upon how involved you like to be in the overclocking process. It reminds us of the old DFI Lanparty motherboards in that you had to put an awful lot of time and effort in to achieve the best results. This is undoubtedly not a ‘change two settings, reboot, enjoy’ motherboard. But naturally if you have put in the time then the rewards are greater. For the Taichi we were somewhat disappointed at the low maximum BCLK, but we needn’t have been too disheartened as it achieved the highest DDR4 speed we’ve yet seen from a Ryzen based motherboard. Our final overclock – in the second screenshot – didn’t quite hit the 4.1 GHz we’ve seen from some other motherboards but wasn’t far off. Ally this to the memory speeds and the Taichi should have some fierce performance in its armoury.

It’s worth noting all of this was3on version 2.20 of the BIOS.

 

With everything else low we did manage to get a screengrab of 3580MHz memory, this was no way stable but does show that the board is capable and would probably get something close with a few more bios updates.

So with 105 BCLK tie in we got 4068.75Mhz as our final clock with 3360Mhz memory, this could be finicky and took some tweaking between benches to keep it all singing the same tune.