ASRock has announced the Z790 Taichi Lite and B650E Taichi motherboards for Intel LGA1700 and AMD AM5 platforms, leaving all the superfluous features behind and focusing on the important aspects.
The Lite series keeps the original specs and features and slaps them into a simplified design, meaning owners won’t miss much compared to full-fledged Taichi motherboards like the Z690 Taichi and X670E Taichi. To be more specific, Lite models lose the fancy heatsink covers and RGB, but keep useful tools like the eight-segment debug display and the onboard power / reset buttons.
Z790 Taichi Lite
Supporting Intel’s 12th and 13th Gen processors – probably also 14th Gen, the Z790 Taichi Lite boasts a 24+1+2 105A phase power design alongside two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, one PCIe 4.0 x16 (x4 mode), one PCIe 5.0 M.2, four PCIe 4.0 M.2, and four DDR5 DIMMs ready for up to 192GB of 7,200MT/s memory. Note that 7,200MT/s speed may only be possible using one single-rank module.
I/O is filled with two USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2, six USB 3.2 Gen 1, two USB 2.0, one HDMI 2.1, 2.5GbE plus 1GbE LAN, two 3.5mm audio jacks, SPDIF, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3. As if it wasn’t enough, the board also includes a bunch of front panel USB headers, adding nine USB ports. Nice.
B650E Taichi Lite
The B650E Taichi Lite, on the other hand, carries AMD’s AM5 socket and features a 24+2+1-phase design alongside one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot and PCIe 4.0 x16 (x4 mode). As this isn’t AMD’s best chipset, PCIe lanes are limited, thus we only get one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot plus another two interfacing via PCIe 4.0 for storage.
Regarding memory, ASRock announced support for up to 192GB of 6,600MT/s DDR5, but in reality, most Zen 4 chips won’t go beyond 6,000MT/s. Same-socket Zen 5, out next year, may handle faster RAM.
In terms of I/O, yet again, we are spoiled with one USB 4 Type-C, three USB 3.2 Gen 2, eight USB 3.2 Gen 1, one HDMI 2.1, 3.5mm headphone plus mic jacks alongside optical SPDIF, 2.5GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3. The front panel can add seven extra USB connections if needed.
An all-around impressive feature list on both boards, without unnecessary gimmicks. Both should easily accommodate next-gen Intel and AMD processors, assuming ASRock releases BIOS updates.
No word on pricing or availability yet; let’s hope ASRock can be aggressive on both fronts.
