The Review of the ASRock X570 Taichi Motherboard

Our testing experience with the ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard was quite interesting, to say the least. The CPU, which we were testing in conjunction with this motherboard, was putting out more heat than the surface of the Sun, a challenge in and of itself but one that was manageable. However, it did require active cooling, something that is pretty much every motherboard in the X570 family needs.

One of the standout features of this motherboard is its ability to deliver high-performance without over-building the VRM solution. This is no easy feat, as it requires a delicate balance between giving the user plenty of options and not overwhelming them with too many settings. But ASRock seems to have hit just the right note, delivering a product that is both functional and easy to use.

In terms of single-threaded performance, the motherboard performed admirably, especially when paired with the 7900X CPU. We were able to achieve very stable results at high voltages, even up to 275 watts, which is quite impressive considering the CPU's thermal design power (TDP) is only 140 watts. This is a testament to the motherboard's ability to deliver high-performance without overheating.

But what really sets this motherboard apart is its flexibility and ability to handle different workloads. In our testing, we found that it performed very well with Linux distributions, including X to 99 and Rison. The motherboard also handled IOMMU (Input/Output Memory Management Unit) testing with ease, which is a critical component for virtualization and other high-performance applications.

One of the things that did surprise us was how well this motherboard handled multi-threaded workloads. Even in the more demanding scenarios, it was able to deliver stable performance without any issues. This is especially impressive considering the competing platforms, such as Rison and Thread Ripper, which also offered multi-threaded performance but with some teething issues.

In terms of Linux testing, we found that this motherboard was actually one of the better options available right now. If you're looking to build a monster system for virtualization or other high-performance applications, this is definitely the way to go. The X to 99 platform offers less headache compared to competing platforms, and the motherboard's ability to handle PCI Express pass-through makes it an excellent choice.

However, if you're looking for extreme multi-threaded performance, there is a competing CPU that will give you better results. But for most users who need a balance between single-threaded performance and multi-threaded performance, this motherboard is an excellent option. And at $1,000, it's definitely worth considering, especially when compared to other high-performance motherboards on the market.

In conclusion, our testing experience with the ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard was very positive. It delivered high-performance without over-building the VRM solution, and its flexibility and ability to handle different workloads made it an excellent choice for a wide range of applications. We highly recommend this motherboard to anyone looking for a high-performance option that won't break the bank.

**UEFI Tour**

If you're interested in seeing more details about the UEFI on this motherboard, I've uploaded a separate video that provides a comprehensive tour of the interface. This video is not immediately available, but it can be found by following the link in the description box below.

The UEFI tour will give you a detailed look at all of the features and settings that are available on this motherboard. From boot options to fan control, we'll cover everything that's worth knowing about this interface. So if you're looking for more information about the ASRock X570 Taichi motherboard, be sure to check out the UEFI tour video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enha X $2.99 isn't that old news isn't there X 399 now well not so fast x2 99 is Intel's platform x3 99 is AMD's platform not confusing at all right this video is about the asrock X 299 Taichi and my experience is putting a system together with it and testing Linux on it and checking it out basically as a and everyman X 2:19 on board as rock really has done something interesting with the Taichi line all the way back to the very first time other boards that they came out with which is sort of everything that you need and nothing that you don't that's kind of kind of the philosophy finding a balance I guess hence the name Taichi not chai tea it does actually pretty much strike the balance for X 299 but it gives you some premium bells and whistles for one it's got dual entailed gigabit mix I would have liked to have seen maybe and a quanti attend gig Nick but for the price point that this motherboard is that that's maybe a big ask because that would add a lot to the price and hey you've got the PCI Express Lanes if you get the appropriate Intel CPU so you can you know you just add an add-in card this motherboard like all X Toonami on motherboards supports everything from the four core four thread kb lake i five in the socket 2066 layering it all the way up to stuff that intel hasn't even come out yet at the time of this video the 18 core behemoth monster as of the time of this video you can get the ten core Intel 7900 X and maybe also the 2.9 gigahertz base clock CPU that's going to be 12 cores from Intel for the X 299 platform but you know the thousand-dollar 10 core CPU I think it would be my recommendation if you're gonna build a board with this maybe the eight core the eight core CPUs around 600 650 us something like that the 10 core is around a thousand us those are really high in CPUs both CPUs really honestly not really for gamers it's a lot of course would be for content creators people that need a lot of CPU people that are doing maybe CAD and professional work where it doesn't quite rise to the level of a true workstation platform with air correcting memory support and you know higher-end features like that that said the thousand dollar CPU does have 44 PCI Express lanes and the $650 CPU has 28 PCI Express lanes so it's kind of a differentiator there how do you know how many CPU PCI Express lanes you need well it depends on how many peripherals you're gonna run you can run a lot of graphics cards with a lot of PCI Express add-in cards like the 10 gig NIC well you're gonna need more PCI Express Lanes the KB like CPU I only have 16 PCI Express lanes your GPU wants 16 PCI Express lanes but it will work with eight so it's like two GPUs basically you're out of lanes we're getting a little ahead of myself just talking about the X 299 platform in general first let's take a tour of the board and give you all the information that you can get by reading the box that's cool you don't like reading I understand it's cool we'll go through the features that are on the box first let's start with the top edge of the board which is pretty Spartan you've got the 1/8 pin power connector now that tells me that the CPU power delivery system on this motherboard it is a 13 phase power delivery system but 13 phase that's kind of weird what it wants to do with that well the power delivery system is a little different between KB Lake and you know Scylla X the KB like X CPU and this guy like Ike CPU because the power delivery system is a little different between the CPUs there is a little bit of redundant circuitry than motherboard manufacturers are saddled with when they're having to cope with KB Lake on this platform so the power delivery system on this motherboard with the single connector the absolute maximum wattage that that type of connector the type of a pin connector supports where you've got the four 12-volt power rails is about 400 watts and that's before things start melting really the safe limit is is probably just over 300 watts 350 watts something like that and that's pushing it and that kind of makes sense because we're talking about 140 maybe 165 maybe that's not really been super finalized what's for your thermal design power of your CPU so if you're if you're going from 140 to 250 that's over a hundred watts of overclock so I think it's perfectly reasonable that you know for the type of reasonable overclocks that you might be doing that's supporting a CPU TDP of around you know 250 watts is is reason so 8-pin again giving you what you need a nothing what you don't think the eight pin power connector is reasonable the real question is how well does it overclock and we'll get to that then we've got two for pin fan headers now this motherboard actually has a total of five four pin fan headers to the supportive mix of one amp power delivery and 1.5 amp power delivery four of the six support three or four pin fans the other two or PWM only CPU the CPU header is one of those which kind of makes sense because hey if you're running a 3-pin chances are it's a water pump and so you don't want speed control on the water pump probably you want the water pump running you know full speed all the time and for a four pin you probably want you know PWM control but there is also a 1.5 amp water pump header that does give you three or four pin controls so if you have one of the water pumps that has the DC control from a three pin you can use that on the water pump header and it'll also give you 1.5 amps so you've got options routing the edge of the motherboard we've got our first RGB header a 24 pin CPU power connector and our first USB 3.0 that's USB 3.1 gen2 on front panel connector then we've got 10 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports then just below the SATA ports we've got our chassis fan our first four pin chassis fan header and then we've got a bevy of front panel connection so this is for system panel or front panel connections power LED speaker reset that sort of thing also at the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got another three pin four pin fan connector this is also a water pump connector which means this connector will deliver up to 1.5 amps next to that you can see our BIOS a and BIOS B it does us also support flashing the BIOS through USB BIOS flash back as it calls it on the back of the box means that you know when Intel finally does come out with out 18 core CPU if you adopt that and you have to get old stock and one of these motherboards it has a you a father doesn't support the CPU you can use that functionality to upgrade the UEFI on the on the motherboard to support that CPU where it might not post with that CPU because the CPU is too new that gives you the option to upgrade the UEFI without even having you know having to have one of the older CPUs then we've got two USB 2.0 headers for internal peripherals or breakout headers or anything like that that you might use a TPM header connector if you're using TPM modules and then a thunderbolt header in case you're using a thunderbolt add-in card next to that we've got a 4 pin RGB led header strip and then a clear CMOS jumper and then our isolated front panel audio connections now just below the CPU socket near one of the banks of memory is another four pin fan header you can use this for a rear fan or something like that and then opposite that you've got the Intel vrock module what the heck is a vrock module well Intel's kinda painted itself into a corner with MDOT to raid and so you the consumer should totally pay Intel extra money for the corner that it painted itself into with with vrock know I'm being a little hard on Intel let me tell you what it what it does so see all these MDOT two slots this motherboard has three MDOT two slots two eighty millimeter one 110 millimeter m2 slot it's pretty great all three of those MDOT 2's go through the PCH the PCH is connected to the CPU with a BMI 3.0 interface which is a maximum of 32 gigabits 4 gigabytes per second so if you're gonna use MDOT to raid on this the absolute maximum that raid array is going to go is 4 gigabytes per second read and write so seems like a bottleneck when you're talking about the you know samsung 960 Pro which which can do that so Intel has a an option for you you can plug a module into that header and that will let you use some of the PCI Express Lanes for your end onto devices now you're still gonna need an adapter to plug those m dot 2 s into a PCI Express expansion slot that is not included and put the vrock module but when you do that the m dot 2's will be supported off of the PCI Express Lanes instead of the DMI lanes so that removes the DMI bottleneck maybe it's helpful with a block diagram in this system basically all these quote unquote low-speed peripherals are gated through the PCH that's not actually a bad thing that's good design you should take all of the low-speed peripherals and not give them tons and tons of bandwidth because that's wasteful of your PCI Express resources the problem is that we've transitioned our nvme devices from you know being somewhat faster than SATA and significantly faster than SATA 2 oh my gosh a single gum stick sized m2 can actually deliver over 3 gigabytes per second read you talked about obtain assuming that Intel made consumer m dot 2 obtains with a reasonable capacity they don't at the time of this video you can only get 16 or 32 gigabytes to choose for acceleration but one supposes that the business and of Intel will sort of you know say hey maybe we should actually make some reasonable capacity octane because it actually is a really good really interesting technology the enterprise is gonna buy the crap out of octane drugs so with this vrock module you buy this thing and it unlocks functionality it's just a software unlocked on your motherboard the module doesn't actually do anything however if you buy Intel fultonville in vme SSDs then you get the raid zero functionality for free hmm I don't know about that okay sounds good you can buy another more expensive module and get more raid functionality but again you need an adapter because you can't actually use the m2 well you can it'll just be bottleneck because if you use the m2 s that are on the motherboard it's not going to magically unplug those connections from the PCH and plug them in to the PCI Express Lanes on the CPU no motherboard that I've seen 4x 299 yet does that so it's really just a needlessly complicated situation on X 299 and if you're just like I just wanted to know what features that the motherboard has I don't really care about these features if you're buying a machine that's this high-end that has 10 cores you're really gonna put those cores to use and you're thinking about raid an nvme raid you've got a little bit more homework to do I'm sorry because understanding this situation will be really important for squeezing the maximum performance out of whatever it is that you're building ok let's talk about the PCI Express slots on this motherboard we're there finally for the PCI Express line configuration on this if you really are going to run a lot of PCI Express peripherals or you might in the future you definitely should consult the manual because the manual from asrock will give you a diagram of which cpu you know twenty eight lanes maps to these slots enable forty four lanes maps to these enabled but I'm gonna try to do it real quick in this video and have it make sense so if you get the forty four Lane CPU and you get the fully populated motherboard where you're using all four of these by 16 slots the pci express lane configuration is going to be by eight by eight by sixteen by 8 yeah that's kind of weird so if you're running peripherals like video capture cards or machine learning accelerator cards or you know xeon fie cards or whatever you'll want to be sure that you put your graphics card in the third slot when you're using all four lanes because only the third slot is guaranteed to be by sixteen on that platform now if you're not running all the peripherals in the top slot will also be by 16 so you know the other configuration will be by 16 by 8 by 16 by 0 so the bottom slot ends up being not used or you shouldn't populate the bottom slot if you want the configuration to be by 16 by 8 by 16 or by 16 and you don't have a card and by 16 in the case of SLI because that will give your graphics card it's the most bandwidth possible if you're only 28 lines there's no way to give both of your FX cards by 16 that makes sense the math checks out but you're in a situation where it's like well wait a minute there's not enough PCI Express lanes for everybody yes that's right so in that situation it's gonna be by 16 by 0 by 8 by 0 or by 8 by 0 by 8 by 8 so the usable slots on a 28 Lane CPU assuming that you're using all of them would be the top one skip one and then the next 2 so that kind of makes sense from a peripheral standpoint because if you've got two graphics cards in there they'll be by 8 and then you've got another expansion slot you use for a video capture device or something like that but there's not enough clearance to use you know a double high card in that third slot or or whatever now it's worth mentioning that if you're using a KB like CPU things get even weirder because the KB like CPU only has 16 PCI Express lanes and on say like a z170 or Z's who's have any motherboard you could actually run a graphics card at you know by 8 by 8 on that motherboard this motherboard you can't do it it's by 8 by 0 by 4 by 0 the other four PCI Express Lanes are used elsewhere for other connectivity so you can't even run by 8 by 8 with KB Lake on X 299 Intel really does not appreciate it when the reviewers say that KB Lake X on X 299 does not make any sense but it does not make any sense my personal opinion is the reason they did that is so that they could say oh you can you know do 5 gigahertz or 5.5 gigahertz you can have the top-end a single thread performance with the version of the 7700 K that is socketed 4 X 299 because when you increase the core count it's really hard to get those ridiculous single threads clock speeds so you know it is what it is alright for the rear i/o on this motherboard we've got 2 USB 2.0 ports a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard for it a CMOS reset button then this is our Arlis solution a an Intel 802 11 AC wireless solution connector then we've got our BIOS flash back button this is the functionality I was talking about before where you can hit the button and upgrade the UEFI in the system even when it's off even if you have a CPU that's not supported even if it won't post then you've got two USB 3.0 that's USB 3.1 gen2 protocol connectors and your first of two Intel gigabit NICs then we've got the other in Telugu but NIC one of those is an IEEE 219 the other ones 5 to 1180 then we've got our USB 3.1 gen2 10 gigabit per second port provided by an as media controller then we've got our audio connections including an optical s/pdif port this is an implementation of the realtek ALC 12:20 which as rakhal's purity sounds for and it does also support DTS connect so if you're doing stuff with you know DTS connect format audio totally works totally is fun Oh in the eyes Media USB 3.1 gen2 controller is an AZ media 31 42 last thing about the physical thing what's in the box well you get the i/o shield cover the driver CD the manual the software installation manual which gives you some information about the stuff that's in the BIOS but not a lot of info you get both the high speed bridge and a 3-way SLI connector in case you're running slightly older graphics cards you get four SATA 6 gigabits per second connectors the as rocket aichi postcard look at that it's a nice postcard and then you get to rubber duck antennas again everything that you need that thing that you don't although I would like to see just just a few bucks more spent on the wireless antenna solutions because it's really not great having the wireless antennas sticking out the back of the computer I'd much rather have a a moveable antenna on a wire I feel like that people get a lot more mileage out of that then the antennas at the back of the case that said you can order them I mean you can go on Amazon or Ebay or whatever and order better Wi-Fi antennas if you're having signal problems but you know the Intel 802 11 AC wireless solution is a good one it is it is not an inexpensive option to add to motherboards so it is nice that as rocky used the good quality Intel Nick's and the good quality Intel wireless adapter so you know good job now overclock ability you may have detected to some hesitation talking about the vrm solution on the X 299 Taichi and again as rock is walking a really fine line here between you know not over building the vrm and also not really paying attention to intel's you know super optimistic I mean 140 watt and PDP is is I don't is almost borderline like just no no you can get a ton of performance a ton more performance out of your standard 1700 X not even really overclocking just changing the the long and short power duration limits on the CPU you've still got thermal protection so with the CPU gets really hot it'll down clock but the 7900 series like this skylake x-series of CPUs from Intel they drink power and they run hot there is just no way around it and so with the Taichi you know historically has Rock has given you overclock ability and they've also done that here this has got the hyper be clock to engine and so you can do base clock overclocking which may actually result in better over clocks a lot of time then more multiplier and with this guy like X we're also talking about things that can limit you know overclock ability you need the negative multiplier for like a V X type instructions if you're running a V X work clothes these things support avx-512 if you get the higher end CPUs so it's really it's a really interesting situation when it comes to overclocking and so you know 13 phase power delivery system well both sets of power phase delivery for both CPUs yes that's true but you can't I don't think that the the sky like X CPU is going to use the KB like X power delivery system so that said 70 100x we haven't 7100 X that was not cherry picked it is a retail 7900 x because that's just how we roll and the 70 100 X that we have will hit 4.5 gigahertz on all cores with crazy amounts of cooling and crazy voltage this motherboard delivered that and it was fine and it was stable except for you know the CPU putting out more heat than the surface of the Sun which is a challenge in and of itself but the motherboard delivered the vrm area did get quite warm it does require active cooling like pretty much every motherboard that we've seen in the ex 299 family so I think that as a rock did a really good job just sort of nailing the line between not over building the vrm solution and giving you something that you could reasonably expect because if you're shelling out $1,000 for a CPU goodness gracious you're gonna want to squeeze every bit of performance out of that you possibly can and this motherboard delivered that on our you know 70 100x CPU if you're running the eight core things are gonna be a little easier on you on the eight core side of things but I think that uh I forget the voltage but I remember doing like doing some quick math and thinking wow we're delivering like 275 watts to the CPU in order to get this thing to be like 4.5 stable for all of the stuff that we're doing now you can back off the voltage a little bit you can do the AV ex- multiplier and you can do some other stuff and get that wattage down around like 230 240 watts which is honestly very surprising you think about it it's like you run in the middle 7900 X going from a heard and 40 watt TDP to actually consuming it's not exactly an apples to oranges comparison but uh it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison but going from you know 140 watt thermal design power to actually dumping you know 220 230 250 watts into the CPU that that energy is going to heat one way or another so that's that's a so it's a lot of energy to be dumping through silicon slot energy to be dumping through that 2066 socket but the motherboard delivered it so there you go now in terms of Linux testing and iommu honestly X to 99 right now at today as of this video is the better platform versus competing platforms if you want high core count and not insanely expensive at least not as expensive as Xeon you're willing to give up air correctly memory you don't need air correcting memory in your application the eight core or the ten core are both really good I would not recommend the six core even though that is a sky like X part I would also not recommend any of the KB like parts for those type workloads OMM you works great out-of-the-box the Taichi UEFI is basically the same as we've come to expect from asrock so no surprise is there everything on Lenox basically worked pass through all of that stuff basically works it still got some teething issues you know by comparison on the competing platform it still has some teething issues on Rison and thread Ripper so if you're looking to build a monster system for virtualization and you want to do PCI Express pass through the X to 99 platform is the lower amount of headache right now if that's a kind of a developing story though and if you want to follow along you should subscribe to the level one Linux channel where we're gonna explore that and all that kind of thing in terms of just monster you know multi-processing AMD's got a competing thousand dollar cpu that'll give you better multi processing and you can run more virtual machines and more virtual machines with some some higher performance but the 7900 X is kind of a balance between single thread performance and applications that still need single thread performance and you still get ten cores so you asked a thousand dollars and yet is gimped in weird ways like the whole PCI Express Lanes a thing if you drop down to eight eight cores but you know if you're spending a thousand dollars on a CPU and your time's worth something that may be worth something overall this is a pretty solid motherboard I've been pretty happy with it in testing only do they're about 72 hours of burning testing so we've got some more testing to do but if you pick up one of these and and you want to share your experiences please do so at the level one text forums I'm Wendell I'm signing out and i'll see you there oh I almost forgot a tour of the UEFI I don't know should this be in a separate video I don't know I think it messes with the Google the Google Analytics because it's like nobody wants to watch the UEFI but I'd if I were gonna buy this board it's like oh my gosh somebody posted a thing that has all of the screens in the UEFI I would want to see that so maybe I'll upload that as a separate video unlisted I don't know so if it's not immediately right now it's in a link in the description see itha X $2.99 isn't that old news isn't there X 399 now well not so fast x2 99 is Intel's platform x3 99 is AMD's platform not confusing at all right this video is about the asrock X 299 Taichi and my experience is putting a system together with it and testing Linux on it and checking it out basically as a and everyman X 2:19 on board as rock really has done something interesting with the Taichi line all the way back to the very first time other boards that they came out with which is sort of everything that you need and nothing that you don't that's kind of kind of the philosophy finding a balance I guess hence the name Taichi not chai tea it does actually pretty much strike the balance for X 299 but it gives you some premium bells and whistles for one it's got dual entailed gigabit mix I would have liked to have seen maybe and a quanti attend gig Nick but for the price point that this motherboard is that that's maybe a big ask because that would add a lot to the price and hey you've got the PCI Express Lanes if you get the appropriate Intel CPU so you can you know you just add an add-in card this motherboard like all X Toonami on motherboards supports everything from the four core four thread kb lake i five in the socket 2066 layering it all the way up to stuff that intel hasn't even come out yet at the time of this video the 18 core behemoth monster as of the time of this video you can get the ten core Intel 7900 X and maybe also the 2.9 gigahertz base clock CPU that's going to be 12 cores from Intel for the X 299 platform but you know the thousand-dollar 10 core CPU I think it would be my recommendation if you're gonna build a board with this maybe the eight core the eight core CPUs around 600 650 us something like that the 10 core is around a thousand us those are really high in CPUs both CPUs really honestly not really for gamers it's a lot of course would be for content creators people that need a lot of CPU people that are doing maybe CAD and professional work where it doesn't quite rise to the level of a true workstation platform with air correcting memory support and you know higher-end features like that that said the thousand dollar CPU does have 44 PCI Express lanes and the $650 CPU has 28 PCI Express lanes so it's kind of a differentiator there how do you know how many CPU PCI Express lanes you need well it depends on how many peripherals you're gonna run you can run a lot of graphics cards with a lot of PCI Express add-in cards like the 10 gig NIC well you're gonna need more PCI Express Lanes the KB like CPU I only have 16 PCI Express lanes your GPU wants 16 PCI Express lanes but it will work with eight so it's like two GPUs basically you're out of lanes we're getting a little ahead of myself just talking about the X 299 platform in general first let's take a tour of the board and give you all the information that you can get by reading the box that's cool you don't like reading I understand it's cool we'll go through the features that are on the box first let's start with the top edge of the board which is pretty Spartan you've got the 1/8 pin power connector now that tells me that the CPU power delivery system on this motherboard it is a 13 phase power delivery system but 13 phase that's kind of weird what it wants to do with that well the power delivery system is a little different between KB Lake and you know Scylla X the KB like X CPU and this guy like Ike CPU because the power delivery system is a little different between the CPUs there is a little bit of redundant circuitry than motherboard manufacturers are saddled with when they're having to cope with KB Lake on this platform so the power delivery system on this motherboard with the single connector the absolute maximum wattage that that type of connector the type of a pin connector supports where you've got the four 12-volt power rails is about 400 watts and that's before things start melting really the safe limit is is probably just over 300 watts 350 watts something like that and that's pushing it and that kind of makes sense because we're talking about 140 maybe 165 maybe that's not really been super finalized what's for your thermal design power of your CPU so if you're if you're going from 140 to 250 that's over a hundred watts of overclock so I think it's perfectly reasonable that you know for the type of reasonable overclocks that you might be doing that's supporting a CPU TDP of around you know 250 watts is is reason so 8-pin again giving you what you need a nothing what you don't think the eight pin power connector is reasonable the real question is how well does it overclock and we'll get to that then we've got two for pin fan headers now this motherboard actually has a total of five four pin fan headers to the supportive mix of one amp power delivery and 1.5 amp power delivery four of the six support three or four pin fans the other two or PWM only CPU the CPU header is one of those which kind of makes sense because hey if you're running a 3-pin chances are it's a water pump and so you don't want speed control on the water pump probably you want the water pump running you know full speed all the time and for a four pin you probably want you know PWM control but there is also a 1.5 amp water pump header that does give you three or four pin controls so if you have one of the water pumps that has the DC control from a three pin you can use that on the water pump header and it'll also give you 1.5 amps so you've got options routing the edge of the motherboard we've got our first RGB header a 24 pin CPU power connector and our first USB 3.0 that's USB 3.1 gen2 on front panel connector then we've got 10 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports then just below the SATA ports we've got our chassis fan our first four pin chassis fan header and then we've got a bevy of front panel connection so this is for system panel or front panel connections power LED speaker reset that sort of thing also at the bottom edge of the motherboard we've got another three pin four pin fan connector this is also a water pump connector which means this connector will deliver up to 1.5 amps next to that you can see our BIOS a and BIOS B it does us also support flashing the BIOS through USB BIOS flash back as it calls it on the back of the box means that you know when Intel finally does come out with out 18 core CPU if you adopt that and you have to get old stock and one of these motherboards it has a you a father doesn't support the CPU you can use that functionality to upgrade the UEFI on the on the motherboard to support that CPU where it might not post with that CPU because the CPU is too new that gives you the option to upgrade the UEFI without even having you know having to have one of the older CPUs then we've got two USB 2.0 headers for internal peripherals or breakout headers or anything like that that you might use a TPM header connector if you're using TPM modules and then a thunderbolt header in case you're using a thunderbolt add-in card next to that we've got a 4 pin RGB led header strip and then a clear CMOS jumper and then our isolated front panel audio connections now just below the CPU socket near one of the banks of memory is another four pin fan header you can use this for a rear fan or something like that and then opposite that you've got the Intel vrock module what the heck is a vrock module well Intel's kinda painted itself into a corner with MDOT to raid and so you the consumer should totally pay Intel extra money for the corner that it painted itself into with with vrock know I'm being a little hard on Intel let me tell you what it what it does so see all these MDOT two slots this motherboard has three MDOT two slots two eighty millimeter one 110 millimeter m2 slot it's pretty great all three of those MDOT 2's go through the PCH the PCH is connected to the CPU with a BMI 3.0 interface which is a maximum of 32 gigabits 4 gigabytes per second so if you're gonna use MDOT to raid on this the absolute maximum that raid array is going to go is 4 gigabytes per second read and write so seems like a bottleneck when you're talking about the you know samsung 960 Pro which which can do that so Intel has a an option for you you can plug a module into that header and that will let you use some of the PCI Express Lanes for your end onto devices now you're still gonna need an adapter to plug those m dot 2 s into a PCI Express expansion slot that is not included and put the vrock module but when you do that the m dot 2's will be supported off of the PCI Express Lanes instead of the DMI lanes so that removes the DMI bottleneck maybe it's helpful with a block diagram in this system basically all these quote unquote low-speed peripherals are gated through the PCH that's not actually a bad thing that's good design you should take all of the low-speed peripherals and not give them tons and tons of bandwidth because that's wasteful of your PCI Express resources the problem is that we've transitioned our nvme devices from you know being somewhat faster than SATA and significantly faster than SATA 2 oh my gosh a single gum stick sized m2 can actually deliver over 3 gigabytes per second read you talked about obtain assuming that Intel made consumer m dot 2 obtains with a reasonable capacity they don't at the time of this video you can only get 16 or 32 gigabytes to choose for acceleration but one supposes that the business and of Intel will sort of you know say hey maybe we should actually make some reasonable capacity octane because it actually is a really good really interesting technology the enterprise is gonna buy the crap out of octane drugs so with this vrock module you buy this thing and it unlocks functionality it's just a software unlocked on your motherboard the module doesn't actually do anything however if you buy Intel fultonville in vme SSDs then you get the raid zero functionality for free hmm I don't know about that okay sounds good you can buy another more expensive module and get more raid functionality but again you need an adapter because you can't actually use the m2 well you can it'll just be bottleneck because if you use the m2 s that are on the motherboard it's not going to magically unplug those connections from the PCH and plug them in to the PCI Express Lanes on the CPU no motherboard that I've seen 4x 299 yet does that so it's really just a needlessly complicated situation on X 299 and if you're just like I just wanted to know what features that the motherboard has I don't really care about these features if you're buying a machine that's this high-end that has 10 cores you're really gonna put those cores to use and you're thinking about raid an nvme raid you've got a little bit more homework to do I'm sorry because understanding this situation will be really important for squeezing the maximum performance out of whatever it is that you're building ok let's talk about the PCI Express slots on this motherboard we're there finally for the PCI Express line configuration on this if you really are going to run a lot of PCI Express peripherals or you might in the future you definitely should consult the manual because the manual from asrock will give you a diagram of which cpu you know twenty eight lanes maps to these slots enable forty four lanes maps to these enabled but I'm gonna try to do it real quick in this video and have it make sense so if you get the forty four Lane CPU and you get the fully populated motherboard where you're using all four of these by 16 slots the pci express lane configuration is going to be by eight by eight by sixteen by 8 yeah that's kind of weird so if you're running peripherals like video capture cards or machine learning accelerator cards or you know xeon fie cards or whatever you'll want to be sure that you put your graphics card in the third slot when you're using all four lanes because only the third slot is guaranteed to be by sixteen on that platform now if you're not running all the peripherals in the top slot will also be by 16 so you know the other configuration will be by 16 by 8 by 16 by 0 so the bottom slot ends up being not used or you shouldn't populate the bottom slot if you want the configuration to be by 16 by 8 by 16 or by 16 and you don't have a card and by 16 in the case of SLI because that will give your graphics card it's the most bandwidth possible if you're only 28 lines there's no way to give both of your FX cards by 16 that makes sense the math checks out but you're in a situation where it's like well wait a minute there's not enough PCI Express lanes for everybody yes that's right so in that situation it's gonna be by 16 by 0 by 8 by 0 or by 8 by 0 by 8 by 8 so the usable slots on a 28 Lane CPU assuming that you're using all of them would be the top one skip one and then the next 2 so that kind of makes sense from a peripheral standpoint because if you've got two graphics cards in there they'll be by 8 and then you've got another expansion slot you use for a video capture device or something like that but there's not enough clearance to use you know a double high card in that third slot or or whatever now it's worth mentioning that if you're using a KB like CPU things get even weirder because the KB like CPU only has 16 PCI Express lanes and on say like a z170 or Z's who's have any motherboard you could actually run a graphics card at you know by 8 by 8 on that motherboard this motherboard you can't do it it's by 8 by 0 by 4 by 0 the other four PCI Express Lanes are used elsewhere for other connectivity so you can't even run by 8 by 8 with KB Lake on X 299 Intel really does not appreciate it when the reviewers say that KB Lake X on X 299 does not make any sense but it does not make any sense my personal opinion is the reason they did that is so that they could say oh you can you know do 5 gigahertz or 5.5 gigahertz you can have the top-end a single thread performance with the version of the 7700 K that is socketed 4 X 299 because when you increase the core count it's really hard to get those ridiculous single threads clock speeds so you know it is what it is alright for the rear i/o on this motherboard we've got 2 USB 2.0 ports a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard for it a CMOS reset button then this is our Arlis solution a an Intel 802 11 AC wireless solution connector then we've got our BIOS flash back button this is the functionality I was talking about before where you can hit the button and upgrade the UEFI in the system even when it's off even if you have a CPU that's not supported even if it won't post then you've got two USB 3.0 that's USB 3.1 gen2 protocol connectors and your first of two Intel gigabit NICs then we've got the other in Telugu but NIC one of those is an IEEE 219 the other ones 5 to 1180 then we've got our USB 3.1 gen2 10 gigabit per second port provided by an as media controller then we've got our audio connections including an optical s/pdif port this is an implementation of the realtek ALC 12:20 which as rakhal's purity sounds for and it does also support DTS connect so if you're doing stuff with you know DTS connect format audio totally works totally is fun Oh in the eyes Media USB 3.1 gen2 controller is an AZ media 31 42 last thing about the physical thing what's in the box well you get the i/o shield cover the driver CD the manual the software installation manual which gives you some information about the stuff that's in the BIOS but not a lot of info you get both the high speed bridge and a 3-way SLI connector in case you're running slightly older graphics cards you get four SATA 6 gigabits per second connectors the as rocket aichi postcard look at that it's a nice postcard and then you get to rubber duck antennas again everything that you need that thing that you don't although I would like to see just just a few bucks more spent on the wireless antenna solutions because it's really not great having the wireless antennas sticking out the back of the computer I'd much rather have a a moveable antenna on a wire I feel like that people get a lot more mileage out of that then the antennas at the back of the case that said you can order them I mean you can go on Amazon or Ebay or whatever and order better Wi-Fi antennas if you're having signal problems but you know the Intel 802 11 AC wireless solution is a good one it is it is not an inexpensive option to add to motherboards so it is nice that as rocky used the good quality Intel Nick's and the good quality Intel wireless adapter so you know good job now overclock ability you may have detected to some hesitation talking about the vrm solution on the X 299 Taichi and again as rock is walking a really fine line here between you know not over building the vrm and also not really paying attention to intel's you know super optimistic I mean 140 watt and PDP is is I don't is almost borderline like just no no you can get a ton of performance a ton more performance out of your standard 1700 X not even really overclocking just changing the the long and short power duration limits on the CPU you've still got thermal protection so with the CPU gets really hot it'll down clock but the 7900 series like this skylake x-series of CPUs from Intel they drink power and they run hot there is just no way around it and so with the Taichi you know historically has Rock has given you overclock ability and they've also done that here this has got the hyper be clock to engine and so you can do base clock overclocking which may actually result in better over clocks a lot of time then more multiplier and with this guy like X we're also talking about things that can limit you know overclock ability you need the negative multiplier for like a V X type instructions if you're running a V X work clothes these things support avx-512 if you get the higher end CPUs so it's really it's a really interesting situation when it comes to overclocking and so you know 13 phase power delivery system well both sets of power phase delivery for both CPUs yes that's true but you can't I don't think that the the sky like X CPU is going to use the KB like X power delivery system so that said 70 100x we haven't 7100 X that was not cherry picked it is a retail 7900 x because that's just how we roll and the 70 100 X that we have will hit 4.5 gigahertz on all cores with crazy amounts of cooling and crazy voltage this motherboard delivered that and it was fine and it was stable except for you know the CPU putting out more heat than the surface of the Sun which is a challenge in and of itself but the motherboard delivered the vrm area did get quite warm it does require active cooling like pretty much every motherboard that we've seen in the ex 299 family so I think that as a rock did a really good job just sort of nailing the line between not over building the vrm solution and giving you something that you could reasonably expect because if you're shelling out $1,000 for a CPU goodness gracious you're gonna want to squeeze every bit of performance out of that you possibly can and this motherboard delivered that on our you know 70 100x CPU if you're running the eight core things are gonna be a little easier on you on the eight core side of things but I think that uh I forget the voltage but I remember doing like doing some quick math and thinking wow we're delivering like 275 watts to the CPU in order to get this thing to be like 4.5 stable for all of the stuff that we're doing now you can back off the voltage a little bit you can do the AV ex- multiplier and you can do some other stuff and get that wattage down around like 230 240 watts which is honestly very surprising you think about it it's like you run in the middle 7900 X going from a heard and 40 watt TDP to actually consuming it's not exactly an apples to oranges comparison but uh it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison but going from you know 140 watt thermal design power to actually dumping you know 220 230 250 watts into the CPU that that energy is going to heat one way or another so that's that's a so it's a lot of energy to be dumping through silicon slot energy to be dumping through that 2066 socket but the motherboard delivered it so there you go now in terms of Linux testing and iommu honestly X to 99 right now at today as of this video is the better platform versus competing platforms if you want high core count and not insanely expensive at least not as expensive as Xeon you're willing to give up air correctly memory you don't need air correcting memory in your application the eight core or the ten core are both really good I would not recommend the six core even though that is a sky like X part I would also not recommend any of the KB like parts for those type workloads OMM you works great out-of-the-box the Taichi UEFI is basically the same as we've come to expect from asrock so no surprise is there everything on Lenox basically worked pass through all of that stuff basically works it still got some teething issues you know by comparison on the competing platform it still has some teething issues on Rison and thread Ripper so if you're looking to build a monster system for virtualization and you want to do PCI Express pass through the X to 99 platform is the lower amount of headache right now if that's a kind of a developing story though and if you want to follow along you should subscribe to the level one Linux channel where we're gonna explore that and all that kind of thing in terms of just monster you know multi-processing AMD's got a competing thousand dollar cpu that'll give you better multi processing and you can run more virtual machines and more virtual machines with some some higher performance but the 7900 X is kind of a balance between single thread performance and applications that still need single thread performance and you still get ten cores so you asked a thousand dollars and yet is gimped in weird ways like the whole PCI Express Lanes a thing if you drop down to eight eight cores but you know if you're spending a thousand dollars on a CPU and your time's worth something that may be worth something overall this is a pretty solid motherboard I've been pretty happy with it in testing only do they're about 72 hours of burning testing so we've got some more testing to do but if you pick up one of these and and you want to share your experiences please do so at the level one text forums I'm Wendell I'm signing out and i'll see you there oh I almost forgot a tour of the UEFI I don't know should this be in a separate video I don't know I think it messes with the Google the Google Analytics because it's like nobody wants to watch the UEFI but I'd if I were gonna buy this board it's like oh my gosh somebody posted a thing that has all of the screens in the UEFI I would want to see that so maybe I'll upload that as a separate video unlisted I don't know so if it's not immediately right now it's in a link in the description see it\n"