ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite Motherboard Review

Verdict and Conclusion

As you are aware, the cost of building a PC in recent years have gone up. You’re now looking at spending well over USD $1,500 for a decent gaming PC, compared to just a few years ago. So it makes since for manufacturers to produce products that are affordable without compromising on features and performance.

When the original Z790 Taichi was first released, it costs around USD $500 or more, but it was still cheaper than other offerings from Asus, MSI and Gigabyte which cost on average, well above USD $600. With so many complaining about costs in general … ASRock have taken this feedback from users and produced Z790 Taichi Lite, which offers the perfect mix between features, performance and price.

The ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite comes with all (if not all) of the enthusiast features found on the original Z790 Taichi, but with less heatsinks, and therefore reducing the overall weight and cost of the motherboard. The RGB lighting is removed from the I/O hood and the chipset heatsink, and is now re-positioned on the bottom heatsink covering the M.2 SSD slots. Other than that, everything else seem to remain the same.

You get same powerful 24+2+1 Phase Power Design, and SPS for VCore+GT, which is provides extra stability especially when overclocking your processor. It also supports the new PCIE 5.0 standards for both graphics cards and M.2 NVME SSDs, as well as supporting DDR5 ram with speeds of up to DDR5-7600MHz +(OC).

For storage, you get a total of 8 x SATA ports, 1 x Blazing M.2 (PCIe Gen5x4), and 4 x Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4x4) slots, which is more than enough for most users.

For connectivity, the motherboard also comes with the Killer E3100G 2.5G LAN, Intel Gigabit LAN and Wi-Fi 6E 802.11ax via the M.2 Key-E wiFi module (installed).

It also comes with 2 x PCIE 5.0 x16 slot supporting all the latest next-gen graphics card and features surface mount technology, which gives it better strength and stability. There’s also 1 x PCIe 4.0 x16 slot,  and 1 x M.2 Key-E for WiFi (occupied).

The diagnostic LEDs as well as the on/off buttons are a nice added feature, and these are usually the hallmarks of an enthusiast motherboard.

During our tests, we used an Intel 13th Gen Core i9-13900K processor, along with 32GB of Patriot Viper Gaming DDR5-7200 ram and a Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card. This is quite a beefy test rig and we managed to get some excellent scores in all of our benchmarks, including a Cinebench R23 scores of 35,096 (multi core) and 2,213 (single core). For PCMark 10, we got a score of 10,365, and a score of 11,623 for PassMark9.

For UL’s Procyon Photo Editing Benchmark, we got a score of 8,964 and 9,430 for the video editing suite. For 3DMark Speed Way and Port Royal, we got a score of 6,245 and 16,302 respectively. And finally, for Timespy and Firestrike, we got decent scores of 28,762 and 44,644 respectively.

As far as features and performance is concerned, it’s perfect and I have no complaints whatsoever. And what’s even better is the price. You should be able to pick up one of these motherboards for around USD $380, which at this price, you’re really getting an amazing deal.

Final Words:

If you’re after a Z790 motherboard with enthusiast features at an affordable price, then look no further. The ASRock Z790 Taichi Lite is a fantastic motherboard that offers the perfect mix of enthusiast features, excellent performance and affordable price.

You can buy the original ASRock Z790 Taichi motherboard for around USD $480 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/445TLi9

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