ASROCK B550 TAICHI MOTHERBOARD

ASROCK B550 TAICHI MOTHERBOARD

The ASRock B550 Taichi MOTHERBOARD is built on the AMD B550 chipset, supporting second- and third-generation AMD Ryzen 9 processors with an AM4 socket. It has four memory slots for up to 128GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM, which can be overclocked to up to 4733+(OC) MHz. For storage, it’s equipped with four SATA III ports and two M.2 slots. There are 3 PCIe 4.0 x16 slots for graphics cards and 2 PCIe 3.0 x1 slots for other PCI-based hardware. Others General features are included.

ASROCK B550 TAICHI Review

Outside of its Aqua series of motherboards, which come with exquisitely crafted monoblocks, ASRock’s Taichi brand has been a critical part of the company’s offerings in the land of premium motherboards. The ASRock B550 Taichi sits at the top of its product stack and features an impressive quality feature set. Some of the most notable features include a large 16-phase power delivery, eight SATA ports, dual M.2 slots, an Intel 2.5 GbE Ethernet controller, and an Intel Wi-Fi 6 interface. At it comes equal in price with the X570 version, which leaves questions on the table as to which one is actually worth the money.

When AMD first released the B550 chipset, a lot of fanfare was made about the high launch price of some models. For what has been usually considered a ‘budget’ chipset, some of the more premium B550 models cost more than some of the X570 models, which featured full support for PCIe 4.0 to add-in cards and the chipset. The B550 chipset has less PCIe 4.0 support than X570, with only the top full-length PCIe slot and one PCIe M.2 slot operating at PCIe 4.0, while the rest of the slots and chipset operate at PCIe 3.0. The trade-off is downstream bandwidth from the chipset as well as power, because the X570 requires a fan to keep that PCIe 4.0 chipset cool. Ultimately X570 requires ‘more’ to be fully enabled than B550, so it comes as a bit of surprise when the B550 and X570 models sit on equal pricing.