Today, we’ll be taking a look at the ASRock B550 Taichi motherboard, which is their flagship B550 motherboard in the Taichi series. It’s aimed at the upper-end of the mainstream market, and uses AMD’s latest B550 chipset, supporting all AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen processors (AM4).
So towards the end of last year, we saw the launch of AMD’s high-end X570 chipset. It was a huge hit among enthusiasts and gamers alike. What made these X570 motherboard so special is that it offered support for PCIE 4.0, which allowed users to achieve amazing SSD performance in read/write speeds … but only if you use a PCIE 4.0 (Gen4x4) M.2 SSD. And let’s not forget, the X570 motherboards also support PCIE 4.0 x16 slots for graphics cards, and although there aren’t many PCIE 4.0-ready graphics card available … you do at least have the option for the upgrade in the near future.
There’s a small downside however … most X570 motherboards that I’ve come across are fairly expensive and may be out of reach for a lot of mainstream users. And I’ve always wondered whether AMD would release a more affordable chipset to cater for the mainstream market. Well, I’m glad to say, they now have … with the B550 chipset.
Now let’s turn our attention back to the B550 chipset. What’s interesting about B550 motherboards, is the fact that it actually support PCIE 4.0 just like its bigger sibbling the X570, as well as options for overclocking and of course compatibility for all 3rd Gen Ryzen processors.
If you’re not too sure what the main differences are between the X570 and the B550 chipset, here is an easy chart for comparison. Basically, the X570 offer full PCIE Gen4 support for both the General Purpose Lanes and CPU chipset uplinks, which will allow for faster performance. While the B550 can only provide PCIE Gen3 support for those lanes.
And to be honest, you’ll won’t see that much of a difference in performance between the two. One of the main advantages of the B550 chipset, is that their motherboards are cheaper and attractively priced, while offering similar performance to the X570.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
The ASRock B550 Taichi can support memory speeds of up to DDR4-5200+ (OC), and it’s compatible with AMD’s 3-way CrossfireX multi-GPU configuration. There’s also the 7.1 CH HD Audio (Nahimic Audio), 2.5GB LAN, Wifi 6 support, power-on and reset buttons, as well as of course, the ASRock Polychrome Sync and their Super Alloy feature.
We’ll be testing the motherboard using trusted AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor featuring 8 cores/16 threads, 16GB of XPG Spectrix D60G ram, along with a Zotac GeForce RTX 2080 AMP Extreme Core. I’m expecting some decent results from our benchmark tests.
OK, let’s start by taking a look at the specifications and features of this motherboard.
You can buy the ASRock B550 Taichi motherboard
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