ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate review

Shaking things up with Z390 at 299 USD

ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate In this review, we peek at one of the most luxurious Z390 motherboards from ASRock, meet the Z390 Taichi Ultimate. ready for 8th or 9th Gen processors this board is about performance, aesthetics and lots of features. The board looks great, a PCH cover. and black and grey style with some gear imagery really looks nice. The dual pin connector should indicate a strong VRM, and this motherboard as such has 12 power phases. Ethernet is king at the Ultimate, included is proper WIFI as well as 2x Gigabit LAN but also wait for it ... a 10 Gbps LAN jack powered by Aquantia.

With the new Coffee Lake-S refresh you can expect three processors predominantly become popular in demand for the PC gamer, as each and every one of the processors will offer fantastic gaming performance if your graphics card is fast enough. Intel is able to boost the Turbo frequencies towards that 5 GHz domain. And that is a big advantage that Intel has over AMD, which is wedges shut at that 4.2 GHz range with Ryzen 2000 (which is overall really good, but the high per clock core is where it matters in CPU bound gaming; e.g. with super high-end graphics cards like the RTX 2080 Ti). Intel is releasing these three 9000 series processors initially:

Core i5-9600K (6 Core / 6 Threads)

Core i7-9700K (8 Core / 8 Threads)

Core i9-9900K (8 Core / 16 Threads)

That does not mean you'll only see three processors in the Core 9000 range, word out on the street is that a procs like 9100, 9400 and 9500 Core series processor will be released as well. However, this specific launch invokes three processors. For this review, we'll use the eight-core / sixteen threads Core i9 9900K through our benchmark paces. You'll be able to tweak this proc towards at least 5.0 GHz on all eight cores with this motherboard.

So yeah, the ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate has 12 IR Digital VRMs. It has been embedded with four DDR4 DIMM slots offering frequencies of 4200 MHz (OC) on the Z390 Taichi Ultimate. Storage includes no less than eight SATA III ports as well as three M2 slots. You get three Gigabit jacks (2x Gigabit and one 10 Gbps) and also WIFI has been embedded, 2x2 802.11ac connection with a possible 1.73 Gb/s throughput. The board as stated is positioned in that higher-end region of what is considered the mainstream desktop segment, Realtek 1220 gets supplemented by a NE5532 headset amplifier and Nichicon capacitors. Have a peek and then let's head onwards into the review my man.