ASRock X299 Taichi XE Motherboard Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The ASRock X299 Taichi XE is available now for around £285.86. That’s a lot of money, but consider the sheer volume of features and build quality here, and it’s honestly pretty excellent value for money. The Gigabyte Designaire is still over £400; the ASUS Prime Deluxe is over £350! They’re both great boards, but are they much better than the ASRock, not really, making this fantastic value for money.

Overview

The latest X299 motherboard from ASRock is like the Swiss Army Knife of motherboards, as it has more features than most people will know what to do with. It doesn’t have a tool for removing stones from a horses hoof, or at least I haven’t found that one yet. For the extreme system builders out there, both professional and hobbyist, it ticks all the right boxes.

Aesthetics

The Taichi motherboards are the coolest looking motherboards on the market in my opinion. That clockwork design just looks too cool. However, there’s little on this motherboard that isn’t focused on performance, yet everything has been dialled in with care, and it shows by looking super sleek and stylish. Chunky heatsinks, heat pipes, armoured PCIe slots, it’s all there for a good reason, but helps with the visuals too.

Extreme Connectivity

This is what the XE does best. When it comes to building a system with 10 hard drives, and three M.2 drives, extreme raid configurations, dual GbE networking and ultra-fast WiFi bridged connections, multiple graphics cards, and a plethora of USB devices, this is what you need. How many people are really going to use all that? I don’t know, but if you’re dropping £10k+ on a rendering system, the Taichi XE will take whatever you throw at it.

Should I Buy One

This is one of the finest X299 motherboards on the market. Not only is it one of the best equipped, best performing and best looking, it’s also considerably more affordable than some of its main rivals. If anything, you would be crazy not to buy this one. However, if it’s not extreme enough you could grab the gaming orientated Fatal1ty edition, which offers 10 GbE networking and some RGB lighting too, but it’s less affordable at £375.57.

Pros

• Fantastic design
• 13 Power Phase Design
• Huge Aluminium Heatsinks
• 4 x PCIe 16x
• Triple GPU support
• ALC1220 and Purity Sound 4/DTS Connect Audio
• Dual LAN + 802.11ac WiFi
• 10 x SATA ports
• 3 x Ultra M.2
• Competitively priced

Cons

• None