ASRock X299 Taichi XE Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

As part of their stunning Taichi range, the XE motherboard comes with that gorgeous clockwork design. It’s not as pretty as their latest X470 Taichi Ultimate, but it’s certainly up there. Obviously, it’s a full ATX motherboard, and as you can see, it’s packed with impressive looking hardware.

With X299, we’re able to have up to 8 DIMMS, and they’ll support ultra-fast DDR4 memory of 4400+ MHz on this motherboard.

Cooling

X299 may have some VRM cooling issues, but I doubt this motherboard will. It features two of their XXL Aluminium Allow Heatsinks, as well as a heatpipe joining the two for more even heat distribution.

The 13 Power Phase Design, dual 8 pin CPU headers, and DR. MOS, should all help you hit those high overclocks too, while also providing around the clock stability for the system.

Power

The motherboard is peppered with connectors, offering up 2 USB 3.1 Gen2, and 8 USB 3.1 Gen1 (including front and rear).

Storage

Storage lovers will find more than they’ll likely need with a whopping 10 SATA 3 ports. Of course, if you’re running RAID drives, this is a huge benefit to you.

There are three Ultra M.2 drive mounts also, giving us 13 HDD connection points in total. Of course, it’ll also support NVMe drives over PCIe also, with CPU Virtual Raid.

Armour

All four primary PCIe slots are 16x and armoured. If you’re eager to build an extreme rendering workstation, it’ll handle 3 way SLI or CrossFireX GPUs with ease, and leave room to spare for another add-in card.

Audio lovers get their kicks too, with the award-winning ALC1220 chipset from Realtek, as well as Purity Sound 4 and DTS Connect technology.

Connectivity

Finally, the rear I/O is packed with hardware too. There’s dual-band 802.11ac WiFi and Dual Intel Gigabit LAN (I219V and I211AT), dealing with the bulk of your connectivity needs. Aside from that, you’ll find all your USB needs are taken care of, good audio connectivity, and BIOS Flashback controls.