ASRock B650E Taichi Motherboard Review

Verdict and Conclusion

Initially, I thought the B650E was a cut-down version of AMD’s enthusiast X670E chipset offering lower performance. But to my surprise, it’s quite the opposite. During our tests, it produced excellent scores in all of our benchmarks. Something I didn’t expect. Both chipsets support CPU overclocking and AMD’s EXPO for optimized memory profiles, but on closer examination, you’ll notice that the main difference between the X670E and the B650E, is the total amount of usable PCIE lanes. The X670E has 44 usable PCIE lanes, while the B650E offer only 36 usable PCIE lanes. Other than that, they are almost identical.

Now that we’re able to run DDR5 ram on AMD’s new AM5 platform, I’m really excited to see what the B650E can offer in terms of performance. Apart from the above, I do know that B650E motherboards are considerably cheaper than the X670E, around $100 difference in price. If that’s the case, then I would recommend the B650E for sure. Why pay the extra for similar performance as a X670E?

OK, let’s get back on track with the ASRock B650E Taichi motherboard. As we mentioned already, this motherboard uses one of AMD’s latest chipsets – the B650E, and supports all the latest Ryzen 7000 series of processors on the new AM5 socket (LGA1718). It supports DDR5 ram with speed of up to DDR5-6400+ OC and come with 2 x PCIE 5.0 x16 steel slots.

As with all Taichi motherboards from ASRock, it comes with a nice sleek metal backplate, which helps with the cooling and adds great aesthetics. You’ll also find steel reinforcements on the DDR5 DIMM slots, as well as surface mount technology on the PCIE 5.0 x16 slots, which gives it better strength and stability while overclocking. Excellent!

The B650E Taichi motherboard uses the same, but powerful 24+2+1 Phase Power Design as found on the higher-end X670E Taichi. It also features ASRock’s new SPS for VCore+GT and provides extra stability especially when overclocking your processor. And just like its bigger brother the X670E Taichi, you’ll find several large heatsinks on the motherboard to help cool the VRMs/Mosfets. It also comes with full cover heatsinks for the Hyper M.2 SSD slots near the PCIE slots, and one on the right side of the board, next to DDR5 DIMM sots.

During our tests, we used an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X processor and a GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. We managed to pull some phenomenal scores in all of our benchmarks, including a Cinebench R23 scores of 27,289 (multi core) and 1,901 (single core). For PCMark 10, we got a score of 9,095, and a score of 9,524 for PassMark9.

For UL’s latest Procyon Photo Editing Benchmark, we got a score of, 9818 and 8,031 for the video editing suite. For 3DMark Speed Way and Port Royal, we got a score of 5,136 and 12,852 respectively. And finally, for Timespy and Firestrike, we got decent scores of 18,408 and 39,666 respectively.

The motherboard offers a load of USB ports including ASRock’s Lightning Gaming Ports, 1 x USB4 Type-C (Rear), 1 x USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C (Front), 3 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A (Rear), and a massive 10 x USB 3.2 Gen1 (8 Rear, 2 Front). The rear I/O panel features the BIOS flashback button, clear CMOS, connectors for your WiFi 6e antenna, HDMI port, lightning gamning ports, Killer E3100 2.5G LAN port,  8 x USB 3.2 Gen2 ports,  and 1 x USB4 Type-C port, and for audio there’s the mic-in, line-out, and SPDIF out.

And finally for LAN connectivity, the motherboard comes with the Killer E3100 2.5G LAN and Killer AX1675 802.11ax (WiFi 6E) + Bluetooth. I think 2.5G LAN is becoming the norm for most higher-end motherboard these days, and this should be more than enough for most streamer, gamer and even content creators.

There’s one thing the B650E lacks … and that’s the number of SATA3 ports for your hard drives. You only get 4 of them (8 on the X670E). Still, that’s more than enough for most users as we all know … M.2 NVMe SSDs are the way to go these days. And for that, you get 1 x Blazing M.2 slot (PCIe Gen5 x4), and 2 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4) slots.

We don’t have a MSRP price on the ASRock B650E Taichi at the time of review, but you can expect to pay around USD $450 from various online retailers. At this price, it’s a little pricey for my liking and costs much more than I expected. Still, it’s a worthy motherboard to consider, especially when you look at the amazing performance you’ll get.

Now the question everyone’s asking is … should you get the X670E or the B650E? Well, here’s my simple answer. If you’re only going to run one graphics card with a load of M.2 SSDs and you don’t need those extra PCIE lanes … then B650E is all you’ll need, plus you’ll probably save an extra $100+

Pros:

• Excellent performance
• AMD B650E chipset
• Supports AMD Ryzen 7000 series processor
• Supports PCIE 5.0 x16 for GPU
• PCIE 5.0 Gen5x4 slot for SSD
• Supports DDR5-6400 (O.C.)
• Feature-rich
• Killer 2.5G LAN
• Killer WiFi 6e support

Cons:

• Price. Apart from that, nothing.

Final Words:

All said and done I have to say, the ASRock B650E Taichi is just as good as its bigger brother the X670E Taichi. It may offer only 36 usable PCIE lanes (44 on the X670E), but it doesn’t really make a difference when it comes to performance, features and overclockability. The ASRock B650E Taichi not only offers excellent performance, but comes packed with some great features that makes this motherboard worthy for any enthusiast.

You can buy something similar, the ASRock B650E PG Riptide motherboard for around USD $275 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/3EctbJj

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