ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite Motherboard Review

Installation

For our test rig, we used the vertical Open Chassis along with a Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL 240 AIO cooler. After mounting the AIO cooler, there was plenty of room in and around the Intel LGA1700 processor socket.

All-in-all, everything fitted nicely, with no issues whatsoever. Being a “Lite” version of the original Z790 Taichi … the I/O hood does lacks some RGB flair 😛

BIOS

The first page you’ll see as soon as you enter the BIOS is the “Easy Mode”. Here you can monitor all the system status on this page. In “Advanced Mode”, you’ll be able to see all the other options available for tweaking your processor, memory and more. Voltages for memory and processor can also be adjusted here.

Other options in the advanced tab allows users to configure settings for the chipset, storage and NVMe, LEDs, as well as onboard devices such as LAN, audio, and Bluetooth.

Since our DDR5 ram is XMP 3.0 ready, we selected Profile 1 and ran the memory at DDR5-7200 speeds. All other BIOS settings were left on AUTO/Default.

For overclockers, the BIOS allows CPU and memory overclocking, and you can also set the CPU frequency and voltages too.

During memory installation, I recently discovered that the positioning of the DDR5 ram modules DOES make a difference!

Normally I would install the first module on A1 slot and the second on B1 slot. This would normally boot up fine and would run XMP profile in quad channel mode (if selected in the BIOS). However, I recently discovered  that in order to run the ram at the specified speed (ie DDR5-7200), I had intall the memory modules on slot A2 and B2.

Why does it matter? I’m still at a loss … it could be just an odd thing on ASRock motherboards. Having siad that, the motherboard manual DOES recommend using slot A2 and B2 for installing 2 DIMMS.

For memory compatibility and QVL (qualified vendors list), I recommend you check ASRock’s QVL page here.