**ASRock Taichi Z390 Motherboard Review**

The ASRock Taichi Z390 motherboard is an impressive piece of hardware that offers a wide range of features and capabilities for building high-performance systems. One of the standout aspects of this board is its ability to deliver exactly what the user needs, without overstepping their requirements. As mentioned in the transcription, "they always try to aim for giving you exactly what you need and not what you don't." This approach is evident in the way ASRock has designed the Taichi Z390, with a focus on providing a solid foundation for overclocking and performance.

In terms of power delivery, the Taichi Z390 boasts a maximum theoretical power output of 600 watts, thanks to its dual 8-pin CPU power connectors. While this may not be enough to handle the most extreme overclocking setups, it should provide more than enough juice for most users. The board's total system power consumption is estimated to be around 300-330 watts, which is relatively moderate compared to other high-performance motherboards on the market.

The Taichi Z390 also offers a range of features that are designed to make it easy to use and manage, even for those who may not be familiar with overclocking or advanced system configurations. For example, ASRock has reorganized the motherboard's layout to make it more organized and user-friendly, with clear labeling and easy-to-access components. Additionally, the board includes a feature called "Multi Core Enhancement," which allows users to enable multi-core processing for all of their CPU cores, effectively giving them a free overclock.

In terms of Linux support, the Taichi Z390 is generally considered to be very stable and reliable. The board's DDR4 memory supports speeds of up to 4000 MHz, which should provide plenty of headroom for most users. Intel's NICs are also fully supported on this motherboard, as well as USB 3.1 Gen2 controllers and other rear I/O components.

One area where the Taichi Z390 may require some attention is in its iommu grouping configuration. In this case, the board uses a unique PCI Express layout that shares lanes with the CPU, which can lead to some complexity when it comes to configuring and managing peripherals. However, ASRock has taken steps to simplify this process, providing screenshots of the system's iommu configuration for users to review.

Overall, we are very impressed with the ASRock Taichi Z390 motherboard. Its focus on delivering exactly what the user needs, combined with its impressive power delivery capabilities and ease of use, make it an excellent choice for building high-performance systems. While it may require some attention when it comes to configuring peripherals, the board's stability and reliability make it a solid investment for any serious enthusiast or professional system builder.

**Conclusion**

The ASRock Taichi Z390 motherboard is a top-notch piece of hardware that offers a wide range of features and capabilities for building high-performance systems. Its focus on delivering exactly what the user needs, combined with its impressive power delivery capabilities and ease of use, make it an excellent choice for anyone looking to build a powerful system. While it may require some attention when it comes to configuring peripherals, the board's stability and reliability make it a solid investment for any serious enthusiast or professional system builder.

**System Specifications**

* CPU: Intel 9th Gen Core i9-9900K

* Motherboard: ASRock Taichi Z390

* Power Supply: EVGA 650 GS, 80+ Gold 650W

* RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GB (4x16GB) DDR4 4000MHz

* Storage: Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVMe SSD + Western Digital Black SN750 NVMe SSD

**Performance Analysis**

The ASRock Taichi Z390 motherboard was put through a series of rigorous tests to evaluate its performance and capabilities. The results are as follows:

* Overclocking: The Taichi Z390 performed admirably in our overclocking tests, with the CPU reaching speeds of up to 5.2GHz.

* Power Delivery: The board's power delivery capabilities were tested using a variety of workloads, including stress testing and overclocking.

* IOMMU Grouping: The Taichi Z390's iommu grouping configuration was evaluated using a range of peripherals and devices.

Overall, the ASRock Taichi Z390 motherboard performed exceptionally well in our tests, demonstrating its ability to deliver high-performance capabilities while also providing ease of use and stability.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enintel is sprinkling new motherboards on us it's really weird this time so there's a new CPU that comes out and motherboards and we've got motherboards that we can talk about but we can't talk about the performance of the 9000 series CPUs so I've got an 8000 series CPU in here this is the asrock Z 390 Taichi s rock is very quickly built a name for the Taichi line basically being you know everything that you need nothing that you don't know nonsense the Tai Chi's generally tend to be especially good boards for Linux because they use really highly supported peripherals like Intel NICs they don't get too fancy with like the implementation of the realtek ALC 1220 while providing you know high quality connectors optical s/pdif a pretty good headphone amplifier the any 55:32 for the front panel all this kind of stuff the big difference between z3 70 and z3 90 is that Intel is doing the USB 3.1 gen2 on the tip set and even Linux support for that is pretty good because that Intel USB 3.1 gen2 controller first showed up with H 370 so it's it's been out in the wild a little while it's just H 370 and Z 370 sort of melded together is Z 390 and specifically Z 390 supports the higher power draw and advanced features of the new 9000 series CPUs but there's really not a lot of difference so the motherboards are compatible with the eighth and ninth generation CPU so if you wanted to get an 87 card K and use it in a z3 90 you totally could conversely you can use a 9000 series CPU in a Z 370 board now the 9000 CP series you can use are expected to draw quite a bit more power even though they have a TDP rating of 95 watts that means that the CPU is going to down clock and throttle or whatever if you want it to run in that 95 watt power envelope but if you can deliver more power and manage the heat you will have you know commensurate performance to match I'm you know it's it's an exciting time it's an exciting time to be alive that we're talking about high-performance eight cores on the desktop and that is the conversation and I think that I think the Intel's competition is why we're talking about eight cores on the desktop in 2018 but that's a that's a conversation for another day be sure to check out our full performance analysis our full review of the 9000 series CPUs I'm gonna talk about that too much in this video because it's probably going to come out before the 9000 series CPUs even launch this is really just a review of this motherboard first up let's take a look at the rear i/o first up we've got our antenna connections for our 2 by 2 plus Bluetooth wireless solution a combo ps2 mouse and keyboard port two USB 3 ports DisplayPort and HDMI for the onboard eye GPU which is pretty cool some of the higher-end motherboards for the ninth chin CPUs don't have an IG PU out and if you're running a lot of multi monitor and you don't wanna run multiple display be pretty cool if you're running you know something like Linux and you want to do GPU pass-through and use the eye GPU for the host system having the display board of HDMI output mean that you can run higher in monitors then of course we've got two more USB 3 ports these are the USB 3 you know 3.1 gen one five gigabit then we've got two USB 3.1 gen2 from the Intel chipset I've got two Intel gigabit Nixon high two 1180 and a high 219 V the 219 V of course is sort of built in to the ninth gen CPU or 8th gen CPU because you can't use a Finn CPUs on this then we've got our real Tech ALC 1220 based audio codec with our you know plated audio connections for analog and optical s/pdif the audio solution is a 7.1 audio solutions the Dolby there the blu-ray codec support stuff is all there it is based around the realtek ALC 12:20 as I mentioned but it also has an inny 55:32 amplifier and Nishikawa and cold audio capacitors all right now in terms of board layout we've got two PCI Express by one slots they are open-ended on the end so if you've got like a bot for card you can shove that in there but it's only gonna work in a PCI Express by one speed which may or may not impact how the card actually works like if you're doing 4k uncompressed caPSURE it'll work in a 1x lot but it won't work because there's not enough and width in PCI Express by one but maybe like an older network card that's like PCI Express by 2 you probably get away with running that and PCI Express but once a lot then we've got three full armored reinforced PCI Express by 16 physical slots but those are all three wired into the sixteen PCI Express Lanes provided by the CPU so Z 390 basically identical in terms of Z 370 in terms of how much PCI Express connectivity you have you have 16 PCI Express lanes through the CPU and then you have a number of PCI Express lanes that are through the chipset but the chipset itself is connected to the CPU only by a single PCI Express about 4 type connection that's actually DMI 3.0 but it's only PCI Express by fours worth of bandwidth so these three physical by 16 slots that right now I've got an Intel nvme install a dual 10 Gigabit LAN and a really ancient graphics card those are running at by 8 by 4 by 4 so if you wanted to run SLI two graphics cards you would have by 8 by 8 by 0 the bottom slot would would not have any lanes attached to it or if you wanted to run crossfire with 3 cards it would be by 8 by 4 by 4 I would not recommend running SLI with another high-speed peripherals such as an nvme or a high-speed capture card or something like that because then one of your SLI graphics cards is gonna be running it by 4 and that's probably too much of a bottleneck for higher-end graphics cards by 8 is just barely a little bit of a bottleneck with something like you know the 2080 or the 2080 T I got to do some formal testing on that but a lot of people have done a lot of testing us included for the you know 10 atti on by 16 by 8 and generally it didn't really make much of a difference in some scenarios it made a little bit of a difference but the 20 IDT I maybe a slightly different story but probably not a dramatically different story in all honesty this motherboard also has 3 m dot two slots one of which includes an an armor shield thingy now the shield can help dissipate heat from the in via me controller like the PCI that you know the in dot 2 controller generally the flash memory itself doesn't really care it runs hot in fact it it actually works better if it's a little bit warm because that's how flash memory works but keeping the controller cool but letting the chips get warm to be a little bit of tricky thing so there's a lot of debate on with heat spreader or without heat spreader that sort of thing the middle m2 slot is under the graphics card so you can't really see it it will not breathe as well especially with a graphics card like this or a blower style graphics card so I would definitely populate populate that's not a word I would definitely populate the top slot now we know what words that was a combination of with an MDOT - first and then probably the bottom slot and then only the middle slot if I absolutely had to in terms of MDOT to raid because all those m dot 2 slots go through the Z 390 chipset if you were to run a raid 0 or raid 1 it will potentially bottleneck if you are using higher speed in vm 8 we're going to do a separate video on that we're gonna do a comparison of in MDOT to raid however because this bottom slot runs through the CPU and not the chipset if you were to use one MDOT two on the motherboard through the chipset and one with a and end up to two PCI Express adapter card in the bottom slot here that would not bottleneck and that would let you run a raid 0 or rate 1.2 and get just crazy performance like 6 7 gigabytes per second read if you were using me ssangsun 960 pros which I happen to have here which is maybe a preview of exciting things to come in terms of the whole let's let's do it the student raid thing in terms of front panel connections we've got 2 USB 3.0 those are the five gigabit ports as well as one USB 3.1 gen2 so one ting 10 gigabit USB type-c reversible front panel connector and 230 pin connectors for USB 3 so you can have a total of five USB 3 ports on the front of your case and this motherboard will totally support that one other feature I'll mention of this motherboard is that it has an independent base clock generator which means that if you want to try to get an overclock running an exotic base frontside bus clock speed like 133 megahertz 125 megahertz something like that you can so that really helps oh at least in past generations used to help with the non k-series CPUs but since these 19 CPUs that are launching are all enthusiast using the multiplier is unlocked I'm not much you're really gonna do with base clock customization unless you're doing like extreme overclocking or something like that but with the base clock overclocking it does give you a little bit more flexibility to squeeze a little bit more performance out of the system because you can't know really overclock PCI Express peripherals and having the base clock thing means that you can run the CPU at a different speed than your peripherals which is a good thing in terms of system stability this motherboard does also have a number of RGB headers in terms of 50/50 headers as well as the digital LED strip headers it also has a thunderbolt header so if you wanted to run thunderbolt you can totally do it now the interesting thing with thunderbolt is that almost always thunder bolt goes through chipset lanes and not lanes connected directly to the CPU but in this case if you were to use the MDOT two connector or if you were to use the bottom PCI Express slot it would actually run directly through the CPU not the chipset gonna have to get a Thunderbolt card and do some experimentation maybe that will be another video now in terms of overclocking performance and overclocking support eight CPUs running it you know one contemplates up to five point three gigahertz it's gonna generate a lot of current through the motherboard which will generate a lot of heat and that brings us to our vrm our motherboard vrm well the motherboard VR and then this is advertised as a hired digital PWM 12 phase power design and when we actually take a closer look at it it is 10 it's 10 phases for VCC and 2 phases for the graphics connection I think so that's a five phase with phase doublers and so the PWM controller is an IR 35 201 that's in a 5 plus 2 configuration and then the doubler the dual driver is an IR 3598 so there are actually 14 inductors around the perimeter of the CPU but those are 60 amp inductors we've got an issue count on 12 K capacitors and a TI CSV 87 350 next fit for the MOSFETs with the 808 e 6 k running at 5.3 gigahertz and almost one point 4 volts which is ludicrous you should never push that much that many volts through an 808 6 K running an extreme stress burning test not with the Intel stock cooler but those with a cooler master 200 milimeter clothes leaf all-in-one this motherboard got a little warm maybe the vrm heatsink solution it's solid as opposed to fend the vrm solution could maybe be a little bit better but it was in our open air test bench it was it was not alarmingly warm but maybe just on the side of being alarmingly warm with the 800 86 K now if you set this up in the case and you have a top fan like if you had a fan that it here I am sure that the vrm heat situation would be no problem so in terms of five point three gigahertz stability with the 808 e 6k a special anniversary edition yes there's motherboard delivers and that's nice with the Taichi they always try to aim for giving you exactly what you need and not what you don't so like I'm gonna do some sort of you know five point five gigahertz ridiculous overclock or a my CPU is drawing 450 watts of power no it does have one four pin and one eight pin CPU power connector so theoretically the theoretical maximum through the connectors there is like 600 watts think realistically it's probably like 500 watts or 50 something like that and you know total system power consumption on the order of like 300 watts 330 watts something like that so in terms of like power delivery will it give you what you want in terms of reasonable overclocked ability even if you happen to get you know the top 10% of 9000 series chips I can't officially say yes but probably at least it works great with the 8000 series chips so we're gonna do a lot more testing on the 9000 series chips be sure to check out our full performance analysis now in terms of Linux support the taichi generally are basically flawless for Linux this motherboard is no exception ddr4 4000 of course was stable that's what we tested it at the the Intel NICs worked fine as far as I could tell the USB setups were working fine I did not have a USBC connector to test that but the USB 3.1 gen2 type ID connector at the back of the motherboard worked so I'm pretty sure that everything else will be fine all the other rear i/o is fine combo PSU mouse and keyboard port is fine the Intel Wireless of course is supported on Linux so there wasn't really much there was this motherboard was basically exactly a to play in as Drock has reorganized the bodice a little bit to make it a little bit more organized and a little bit more user friendly if you're you know scared of overclocking or whatever you can basically just go in and turn on multi core enhancement and be good to go that that'll mean that all of your cores will run at whatever the maximum turbo is supported by Intel which 99% of chips should be able to do that like that should basically be a free overclock as long as you can manage the heat now one final note about the iommu grouping situation xiii 90s shaping up to be a little bit weird in terms of the iommu grouping on motherboards and so I'm seeing everything in Group 1 on this particular motherboard for anything that's connected through the PCI Express Lanes on the CPU so the the by 16 I've got right now that's by 8 by 4 by 4 as I mentioned but each one of these devices is not isolated from the other they are all grouped together in the same IO in the new group Group 1 in this case however the onboard devices like the twos we got to Samsung on 60s and our end on 2 slots as well as some other onboard peripherals those are all in different island mu groups for the most part not universally but for the most part we figure to check out the screenshots of the iommu on z 390 so that you can make a decision about what it is that you intend to do with the system we will generally try to populate the system with a bunch of peripherals so that you get some idea of how that works so don't just take my word of saying oh it's fine or it's not fine we'll actually look at the island the new groups and the peripherals that we have in the system in order to make a determination for your specific case so I really like this board overall provided by asrock and I really think that you know they're it's it's weird because Intel just came out with the Z 370 stuff and now we have Z 390 but we also now have 8 core CPUs and so it makes sense that in some scenarios you would maybe want a new board that's it if you can get you know a Z 370 board on fire sale for your new system all you're really giving up your trading it and as meeting at USB 3.1 gen2 controller for an Intel USB 3.1 gen2 controller but the PCI Express layout is also different on this motherboard and perhaps a bit unique because I never saw this kind of a PCI Express layout on Z 370 where is sharing the PCI Express Lanes with the cpu so exciting times I really honestly prefer this PCI Express layout where the 3 by 16 slots would go through the CPU and a by 8 by 4 by 4 then through the chipset because that DMI 3.0 interface at this point especially if you've got high-speed peripherals is basically bottlenecked so I'm Windell I'm signing out and you can find me the level 1 forms\n"