Performance – Part 1
All tests were performed on the ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite motherboard, Core Ultra 7 265K processor, Colorful RTX4080 Advanced OC graphics card, 96GB Kingston Renegade RGB DDR5-6400 CL32 memory kit, and Predator GM7000 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD. Additional M.2 storage tests were performed on Crucial 2TB T705 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD. The Win11 x64 environment with the latest updates was used for the tests. Everything else will be mentioned during the tests.
Memory performance
The motherboard boots without problem with memory up to DDR5-9200. For anything above 8400MT/s, we will need a CUDIMM memory series. For comparison purposes, we use a 96GB Kingston Renegade 6400MT/s memory kit. I will tell you more about overclocking on the next pages of this review.
As shown on the screenshot from AIDA64, the performance is as high as expected. The new Intel processors have quite disappointing latency, and it’s normal. The Taichi Lite performs well considering used components.
Processor performance and mixed load tests
The rendering benchmark results are pretty good. The same scores are obtained on other ASRock Z890 motherboards or high series of competitive brands like Gigabyte.
Above is the latest version of the Blender benchmark, and below are Cinebench R23 and 2024 results.
PCMark results are essential as they show how all components work with each other in a mixed-load environment. It can be translated into regular daily work, so what we all do and expect good results. The Z890 Taichi Lite performs well in all PCMark 10 tests. Below are our results in the Applications benchmark, which focuses on popular Microsoft applications.
This benchmark scales well with higher RAM frequency on Core Ultra processors, so we must remember that we used a 6400MT/s memory kit for the test. We could gain up to 1k higher score if we used a well-tunned 9000MT/s memory kit at Gear 2 mode.
Storage performance
The maximum bandwidth with the Crucial T705 2TB NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD was about 12593MB/s. This is pretty good for Intel motherboards, but we can only see the higher bandwidth on new AMD motherboards like the recently reviewed ASRock X870E series.
The advantage of the Intel series is significantly higher low queue random 4K bandwidth, which is essential for games and many small file operations.
USB4 storage has been tested using Thunderbolt 4 with the tunneling option. The Taichi Lite gives us two of those ports, which is amazing for all those who work with mobile storage devices, such as portable SSDs.
We could achieve the maximum possible Thunderbolt 4 on our ADATA SE920 SSD.
On the next page, we continue performance tests and focus more on gaming and networking.
