Last year in June of 2020, we reviewed the ASRock B550 Taichi (with video), which we thought was a fantastic motherboard offering excellent performance, with a ton of features at a great price. This time round we’ll be taking a look at the ASRock’s B550 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION, which is ASRock’s second SKU in their recent line up of ‘Razer Edition’ series of motherboards.
Appearance-wise, the ASRock B550 Taichi Razer Edition looks identical to its bigger brother the X570 Taichi Razer Edition, which we also reviewed earlier this year, all except of course the chipset on the motherboard. With that said, the B550 is a very capable chipset with only the difference being the amount of PCIe 4.0 lanes available (X570 has 24 lanes vs B550 with 20 lanes). Both chipset offer PCIe 4.0 support for both GPU and NVMe storage, but for general purpose lanes, the B550 chipset can only support up to PCIe 3.0.
The ASRock B550 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION features AMD’s B550 chipset is compatible with all of the latest Ryzen 3000, 4000 G-Series and 5000 series processors, and supports memory speeds of up to DDR4-5200+ OC.
It supports multi-GPU setups such as AMD 3-way CrossfireX, and features 3 x PCIe 4.0 x16 steel slots. For storage, there’s a total of 8 x SATA ports, 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4 x4), 1 x Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4 & SATA3). And for connectivity, you get the Killer E3100X 2.5GB LAN, as well as the Killer AX1650x Wifi 6.
And as with all Taichi motherboards from ASRock, you also get the onboard power-on/off and reset buttons, as well as the diagnostic LEDs, and all of ASRock’s unique features such as the 16 Power Phase Design, Digi Power, Dr. MOS, and of course, the 7.1 CH HD Nahimic Audio as well as Razer’s Chroma RGB lighting.
As you know, we’ve already reviewed ASRock’s X570 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION motherboard, which we can say is probably one of the best gaming motherboards you can get on the market, for both high-end gamers and enthusiasts. Let’s see what the ASRock B550 Taichi Razer edition can do for us.
Currently, the ASRock B550 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION is around $100 cheaper than its bigger brother, the X570 TAICHI – RAZER EDITION, which makes this ‘enthusiast-grade’ motherboard a great bargain, especially when you consider what you’re getting. Also, another appealing factor of the B550 chipset, is the lack of an active cooling due to the its low operating temperature. Active chipset fan cooling can be found on all, if not most X570 motherboards. I for one, don’t really like these active fans on chipsets, due to the possibility of high noise-level and the usual wear n’ tear.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
We’ll be testing the motherboard using our Ryzen 5 5600X featuring 6 cores/12 threads, 16GB of Thermaltake Toughram RGB DDR4-3200, along with Gigabyte’s Aorus 500GB PCIE Gen4 SSD. I’m expecting the results to be similar to other B550 motherboards and it should compete quite well against the X570 too.
Let’s not waste any time and take a look at the specifications and features in our next page. You can buy the original ASRock B550 Taichi motherboard (non Razer) for around USD $269 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/2OnVeiK
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