ASRock Z890 Taichi ATX Motherboard Review
We all love a solidly built motherboard, but are more likely to rely on the case to protect our components than anything that’s built onto those components. That is to say, while a smooth metal back cover leaves a good impression, that impression is quickly forgotten once the system is assembled. Most builders would rather pay for features that will continue to serve them after the build, and that’s where the ‘Lite’ versions of ASRock’s Taichi motherboards tend to shine.
| ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite | |||
| Socket | LGA 1851 | Form Factor | ATX |
| Chipset | Intel Z890 PCH | Voltage Regulator | 24 (20+2+1+1) Phases |
| Rear I/O | |||
| Video Ports | HDMI 2.1 (4k/120Hz Max), (2) Thunderbolt 4 (8k/60Hz, 5k/120Hz Max) | Audio Jacks | (2) Analog, (1) Digital Out |
| Rear USB 4.x/3.x | (2) 40Gb/s Type-C, (4) 10Gb/s Type A, (4) 5Gb/s Type A | Legacy Ports/Jacks | (2) USB 2.0 |
| Network Jacks | (1) 5GbE, (1) 2.5GbE, (2) Wi-Fi Antenna | I/O Panel Extras | BIOS Flashback, CLR_CMOS Buttons |
| Internal Interface | |||
| PCIe x16 | (1) v5.0x16, (1) v4.0x4 (shared w/M.2) | SATA Ports | (4) 6Gb/s (*1 shared with SATA M.2) |
| PCIe x8 | ✗ | USB Headers | (1) v3.x Gen2x2 (20Gb/s), (2) v3.x Gen1, (2) v2.0 |
| PCIe x4 | ✗ | Fan Headers | (8) 4-Pin |
| PCIe x1 | ✗ | Legacy Interfaces | UART (3-pin), System (Beep-code) Speaker |
| CrossFire/SLI | 2 / ✗ | Other Interfaces | FP-Audio, RGB LED, (3) ARGB LED, Thunderbolt AIC, TPM, (3) Therm |
| DIMM slots | (4) DDR5 | Diagnostics Panel | Numeric |
| M.2 slots | (1) PCIe 5.0*, (1) PCIe 4.0 / SATA 6Gbps, (4) PCIe 4.0 x4 (1 shared w/PCIe slot 2), (1) Key-E | Internal Button/Switch | Power, Reset / ✗ |
| Controllers | |||
| SATA Controllers | Integrated (0/1/5/10) | USB Controllers | ASM3042 2x USB 3.2 Gen1, GL3523 Hub |
| Ethernet Controllers | RTL8126 5Gb/s PCIe, RTL8125BG 2.5Gb/s PCIe | HD Audio Codec | Realtek ALC4082 USB audio w/ESS SABRE 9219C DAC |
| Wi-Fi / Bluetooth | Intel BE200 WiFi 7 (5.8Gb/s) / BT 5.4 Combo | DDL/DTS Connect | ✗ |
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Diagonal stripes printed onto its heatsinks give this generation of Taichi Lite a slightly cheaper than anticipated appearance—at least to us—without being a detriment to the function of these well designed and structurally sound parts. A slide latch releases that top (PCIe 5.0) M.2 slot, three screws hold the cover over the middle three M.2 slots, and the board even has a fourth and fifth M.2 storage slot between the larger heat spreader and its front edge.
If five M.2 storage slots weren’t impressive enough, the Z890Taichi Lite also has two…yes two…USB4 Gen2x2 compliant Thunderbolt 4 (40Gb/s) ports on its I/O panel. We also see an HDMI, several USB 3.2 Gen1 (5Gb/s), several USB 3.2 Gen2 (10Gb/s), 2.5GbE and 5GbE ports back here. And if that’s not enough, there’s a pair of antenna jacks for the factory-fitted Wi-Fi 7 module, a BIOS Flashback and a CLR CMOS button, a pair of old-school USB 2.0, a pair of analog audio and an optical digital audio output back here.
We see only two PCIe expansion slots, the top one fed sixteen PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU and the lower one fed a mere four lanes by the Z890 PCH. And that bottom one even shares lanes with the closest (covered) M.2 slot, so that those who wish to put a card here will be limited to only five M.2 drives. Only five. Yes, that’s still pretty good.
Pulling the sinks off lets us see those six M.2 storage slots in all their glory. The upper slot even has a heat spreader on its underside, which we removed for the bare board photo, leaving behind an apparent wet spot of thermally conductive silicon oil.
The back of the motherboard is even more bare, and we didn’t have to remove any heat spreaders to make it look this way: The only point of interest is its RTL8126 5GbE controller, and the only reason it’s interesting is that the port it connects is attached to the other side.
We’re making these images easily expandable for your inspection, as there’s a bunch of detail that you may not want to miss: The Z890 Taichi Lite’s upper half includes four PWM fan headers, four DIMM slots, two ARGB headers, power and reset buttons, a Type-E header for the Type-C front panel port of most modern cases, and a 19-pin USB 3.x cable for the Type A ports of most moder cases. The bottom edge features headers for front-panel audio jacks, analog RGB, ARGB, an additional Thunderbolt add-in card on the four-lane PCIe slot, two dual-port USB 2.0 headers, a combo header with four-pin beep-code speaker and 3-pin-spaced power-on LED, an add-in trusted platform module, three thermistors, four PWM fans and a front-panel LED/button group. A second 19-pin USB 3.x header is found facing forward from the front edge of the lower half, just above its four forward-facing SATA ports.
Twenty core phases are fed by 110A-rated Renesas R2209004 MOSFETs from a RAA229130 2×12 channel controller. Also seen here are a pair of JHL9040R retimers for the two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a RTS5450 USB Type-C power controller and an RTL8125GB 2.5GbE controller.
An ALC4082 USB audio controller feeds the ESS Sabre 9219C DAC…probably because some “reviewer” once told a motherboard designer that multi-channel audio is no longer relevant? We also see the BE200 Wi-Fi 7 adapter and ASM3042 for rear panel 5Gb/s USB ports.
The front-panel USB 3.2 header group includes a GL3523 four-port hub, Realtek 5452E power controller and GL9904 four-channel retimer, the later apparently feeding the Type-E header directly from the X890’s integrated controller.
You probably don’t need any more SATA cables, but just in case you did ASRock includes four of those—two with a single right-angle end. The Z890 Taichi Lite also includes a 2T2R antenna, a 3-way ARGB splitter cable, a Taichi-braded keyboard key cap, and three thermal probes to serve the board’s thermistor headers.
Firmware
The Z890 Taichi Lite defaults to its Easy Mode GUI until configured to do otherwise, where less experienced users can at least set the boot order, enable there memory’s XMP profile, chose a fan profile and/or enter the onboard RGB control utility. Pressing the keyboard’s F6 function tells it to enter Advanced mode.
The OC Tweaker menu provides several power profiles (Intel Default, ASRock Extreme, Intel Baseline) to enhance automatic overclocks, two built-in overclocking configurations, access to manual overclocking submenus, and ten registers for storing custom overclocking configurations as user-defined profiles.
Beginning with the understanding that the board would reach the CPU’s power and/or thermal limits long before breaching stability limits, we tried using a conservative overclock along with completely unrestricted power and…reached the expected thermal throttle points anyway.
The Z890 Taichi Lite didn’t want to overclock the memory we’d used for benchmarks, so we tried a different set for the screenshots. The mediocre overclock that we reached with this kit came at the kit’s XMP voltage.
The Core Ultra relies almost entirely upon its integrated voltage regulator, and seeing that we were reaching a thermal throttle point led us to try for lower and lower voltage levels…to decrease the CPUs temperature. It didn’t help, as any voltage level low enough to hold back the heat would eventually be too low to keep the CPU stable under load.
The Advanced menu is where we configured the Z890 Taichi Lite to enter UEFI using its Advanced GUI.
The “Tool” menu includes a “Polychrome” ARGB control application, plus some handing utilities for cleaning drives and updating firmware.
Toward the bottom of the H/W Monitor menu is a “Fan-Tastic Tuning” setting that allows users to configure their fan curves by dragging the line on a chart. Above that setting, “Fan Tuning” tests the fans that are in the system to create custom profiles that better reflect what the motherboard designers had in mind when creating the motherboard’s integrated profiles.
| Test Hardware | |
| CPU | (Motherboard-specific as indicated in charts) |
| CPU Cooler | Alphacool Core 1 Aurora CPU, Eisbecher D5 150mm, NexXxoS UT60 X-Flow 240mm |
| DRAM | Patriot Viper Elite 5 RGB 48GB DDR5-6000 2x 24GB Kit |
| Graphics Card | ASRock RX 7700 XT Phantom Gaming 12GB OC PCIe 4.0 x16 |
| Hard Drive | Crucial T700 Gen5 NVMe 2TB SSD |
| Graphics Driver | AMD Adrenalin Edition 24.8.3 |
Because we have not reviewed the Z890-series platform’s new CPU, we were only able to gather general impressions about the motherboard’s operation. Still, for the curious, we did produce the data.
Benchmark Results
It would have been nice to at least get a general impression about the memory performance, but alas it’s been a year since Sandra was updated: It wouldn’t run its default bandwidth test on this CPU’s performance cores, and according to Intel’s previous CPU, running the test on the little cores imparts a performance penalty of around 5%. Meanwhile, Aida 64 shows normal bandwidth but at far higher latency than our earlier CPU samples.
The big surprise is that the 7950X, 13900K, and Ultra 9 285K all provided similar overall performance despite some large discrepancies in a few benchmarks. We could cling to those worst benchmarks if we had a grudge against Intel, but our greater concern was to make sure the board we were testing worked well. And it did, promoting the new processor’s 7% efficiency advantage over its top-rated competitor.
Everything worked on the Z890 Taichi Lite as expected, and the price seems acceptable for its feature set. Unfortunately, anyone hoping to use any of its factory-programmed firmware overclocks to get better performance is likely to end up losing ground: While pairing its lowest programmed overclock with its lowest power setting did get us an extra hundred points in Cinebench, using the higher overclock or any of the higher power settings caused aggressive thermal throttling that lowered the same score by one to two hundred points compared to the stock configuration. We have a feeling that no matter who makes the board or which series we pick from, specific motherboard model selection for Intel’s new Core Ultra desktop processor series will inevitably be limited only to selecting a feature set…and getting it at an acceptable price.
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