It’s still very early days for AMD’s new 800-series motherboards, and also early days in terms of our time with them. There’s still plenty to tease out from this new platform, despite being broadly based on the 600-series, with many benefits and pitfalls still to be uncovered. These are our conclusions from pre-release testing with the also new Ryzen 9900X.
Much like the B650E Taichi Lite before it, the X870E Taichi Lite offers a wide range of tweaks aimed at overclocking, but placing the SKU in the X870E lineup makes it much more price competitive among its peers. An MSRP of $399 won’t be the cheapest X870E board, but it will also be far from the most expensive.
Hefty 24-phase power delivery, on-board diagnostic tools and slightly oversized VRM cooling will all be key draws for enthusiasts approaching the platform with a view to pushing their Ryzen 9000-series or 7000-series chips to the limit. Each is somewhat lacking on other X870/E designs launching today, particularly at this price point. That being said, stability problems will mean that they won’t be able to jump in with both feet in week one; it might be best to hold off for a couple of BIOS revisions and observe how the platform evolves over time.
Overall performance was fine. PCIe storage read rates were in upper bound outliers, while overall compute scores were a little low. The idiosyncrasies present in each of the X800-series results speak to the potential teething issues present in every new platform.
Water and premium cooling afficionados will be happy to see the inclusion of several 3A/38W 4-pin fan headers throughout the board, each in very logical locations for cable routing. They take just a little bit of the guess-work out of pump placement and fan daisy-chaining, unlike some other models.
In common with the majority of modern motherboards, building in the Taichi Lite is easy. However, we would have liked to have seen a PCI-E x16 slot unlatching system that’s starting to crop up more widely on competing brand designs. This motherboard is aimed at the segment least likely to leave a system in a static configuration, so making it easier to remove heavy graphics cards would surely be a small but significant boon.
The board’s simple brushed metal/silvered heatsink aesthetics were appealing but we should be honest and mention that their cog motif is not our favourite. An appearance with even fewer embellishments would be almost unique in today’s motherboard landscape, but that uniqueness itself would have value. Still, these preferences are very subjective, and the silvered effect will certainly make any lighting scheme you choose ‘pop’.
So, we come to the final question: does this motherboard’s performance and feature-set justify the X870/E’s existence and price premium over X670E designs. On balance, right now, probably not.
There simply aren’t enough peripherals that can leverage the improved I/O present on X870E, and WiFi 7’s adoption rate is exceptionally slow due to its cost. The 800-series (and Intel’s counterparts) are priming the market for their inclusion but it remains to be seen if there’s any value to being an early adopter. If you feel it would be more advantageous in the long run to save $100 and opt for a legacy X670E board, waiting out the platform until it matures, you might not really lose out. Still, you’re unlikely to find one that caters to overclockers quite as much as this.
ASRock’s X870E Taichi Lite is a glimpse at what a concentrated mainstream overclocking board could look like. A motherboard for enthusiast overclockers to consider as it matures through BIOS updates and hardware revisions, but might be a little undercooked at present.
Pros
+ Mainstream overclocking specialist
+ Supports USB4 and WiFi 7
+ PCIe 5.0 x8/x8 mode capabilities
Cons
- Marginal value over 600-series counterparts
+ Mainstream overclocking specialist
+ Supports USB4 and WiFi 7
+ PCIe 5.0 x8/x8 mode capabilities
Cons
- Marginal value over 600-series counterparts
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