ASRock X399 Taichi Motherboard Review

[Guest]

Will the X399 Taichi give us style and performance while driving a value position for an already expensive platform?

ASRock X399 Taichi Motherboard Review : Read more

 

[hawkdi8924]

Pretty nice for the price. ??

 

[blppt]

I have one with a TR1950X. Other than there being vast pages of UEFI settings with useless or no labels whatsoever, and the fact that you cannot disable the wireless card (can disable the radio, but the card still shows up in device manager) its pretty much all I could ask for. Especially since the ASUS, GB, and MSI boards in this price range all seemingly were very touchy with certain ram,

 

[jcaulley_74]

This may seem like an odd request, but could you use Microsoft's USBView to pull up the Host controller info for this board? I have an ASRock Z87 Extreme9a/c board that has been a great board until recently. Windows began complaining that it didn't have enough USB resources when I plugged my xbox controller in a couple weeks ago. I don't think I have an abnormally large amount of USB devices, but I do have a few. Keyboard, Mouse, G13, Bluetooth, Headset, Card Reader, Vive, Aquaero, the case front panel hub and 2 monitor hubs. Plunging in the xbox controller sends it off the cliff. The Z87 E9 motherboard has 2 built in USB2 controllers and 1 USB3 controller, but all of the user accessible ports are mapped to the USB3 controller. And since Intel for some reason artificially limited the Z87 to only 92 of the 128 possible connections, it doesn't take much to exceed the limits. I had to buy an add-in USB3 board to keep my devices plugged in. So I'm looking to see if all the ports are allocated to one controller or if they are spread out across a couple.

 

[TheTerk]

JCAULLEY, it might be worth slinging this question to the Discord channel. I've dismantled this board as I continue testing X399, but I'm working on a custom X399 build that I might throw the Taichi in. I haven't decided.

 

[jcaulley_74]

Thanks for responding, I figured it was a long shot anyways. Maybe you can consider taking a couple minutes in your future reviews to look at the USB allocation. A quick google search shows that this is not a rare problem at least. The Vive by itself consumes more than 30 endpoints and puts a serious dent in the USB budget. It's a really quick check and may (or may not) show more differentiation in boards.

 

[papality]

Pros

Better than average performance
Better than average efficiency
Angled headers
Minimal yet stylish aesthetic
Budget performer

Cons

Bare bones packaging
Minor UEFI aesthetic misses



Jeez, what does it take for this to get Editor's Approval? Those seem like pretty meaningless cons

 

[MadOver]

True that. I guess they had to write something...

 

[TheTerk]

It's hard to award a product an Editor Choice award without testing more than 2 products. We're getting there, but if we award everything that's inexpensive then the award won't mean anything. I've only given out 1 other Editor Choice award, so it means something if it gets it.