The Box and Packaging
The box is HUGE and packaging is very similar to ASRock’s other Taichi motherboards You get the usual user’s manual, software setup guide, a Taichi postcard, 2 pairs of SATA cables, 2 sets of M.2 screws, a pair of velcro straps for cable management, a USB bracket, WiFi 6e antennas, and a M.2 heastink with an active fan for cooling the PCIE Gen5x4 SSD.
The ASRock X670E Taichi Motherboard
The X670E Taichi comes with the usual matte finish and features a nice metal backplate at the rear. This gives the motherboard extra sturdiness and helps with the cooling.
The motherboard is really HEAVY, weighing in at well over 2kg! This is all to do with the massive heatsinks which cover the VRMs/Mofets along the top and left side of the motherboard. There are also heatsinks which cover the M.2 slots on the right side of the board, as well as around the PCIE 5.0 x16 slots and chipset.
The motherboard comes with reinforced DDR5 DIMMS slots which is great. This unique design allows you to dramatically overclock your DDR5 ram up to 6600MHz. Please take note: The DDR5 memory slot is NOT compatible with DDR4 ram.
You only get two PCIE 5.0 x16 slots on the X670E Taichi, but it does come with surface mount technology, which gives it better physical strength, as well as a more stable memory signal.
I was very surprised to find out that the new AM5 socket (LGA1718) also uses the same CPU mounting bracket as the previous AM4 socket. This is fantastic news, as you’ll be able to re-use your older AM4 CPU coolers on the newer Ryzen 7000 series processors (AM5).
The I/O panel has large heatsink and is completely covered by a shround displaying the Tachi logo. However, there’s no RGB illumination here.
A Closer Look
There are 2 x 8-pin PCIE power connectors on the top left-hand corner of the board. These are required to power the board and to give you that extra stability.
For connectivity, you get the Killer E3100 2.5G LAN as well as the Killer AX1675 802.11ax (WiFi 6E) + Bluetooth 5.0. You get plenty of storage option, including a total of 8 x SATA3 ports, and 4 x M.2 slots for SSDs. These include 1 x Blazing M.2 (PCIe Gen5 x4), 2 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4), and 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4 & SATA3) slots.
There are a lot of pin headers for RGB 😀 You’ll find 2 x 3-pin ARGB (5V) headers located near the top right side of the motherboard, and 1 x 3-pin ARGB (5V) header, as well as1 x 4-pin RGB (12V) near the bottom right side of the board.
There’s plenty of USB connectivity. You get 2 x USB4 Type-C (Rear), 1 x USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C (Front), 5 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A (Rear), 7 x USB 3.2 Gen1 (3 Rear, 4 Front). I also like the usual onboard power on/off and reset buttons, as well as the diagnostic LEDs.
For audio, it features ESS SABRE9218 DAC and Realtek 5.1 CH HD Audio codec. There are 4 little red squares located on the bottom left-hand corned of the board, and these are the high end audio WIMA Caps.
This motherboard is covered with heatsinks everywhere! And there’s even a heatpipe that runs from the chipset, and goes past one of the M.2 slot before finally reaching the main heatsink on the I/O panel. You can optionally use the include M.2 heatsink with built-in active fan. This can be mounted on the first M.2 slot which ASRock calls Blazing M.2. It’s basically a PCIE 5.0 Gen5x4 slot, which can run extremely hot and thus affecting its performance according to ASRock. The extra heatsink and fan will help reduce the temperature and this will increase read/write performance.
The rear I/O panel include the BIOS flashback button, clear CMOS, connectors for your WiFi 6e antenna, HDMI port, lightning gamning ports, Killer E3100 2.5G LAN port, mic-in, line-out, SPDIF out, 6 x USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, and 2 x Type-C ports.
