ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate Review

ASRock Z390 Taichi Ultimate

March 3, 2019

In my opinion ASRock  has been making a hard push into the gaming sector with their release of the Taichi lineup. I have stumbled upon this series by looking for a great deal that included three things, between two - three M.2 slots for super fast storage, high number of SATA3 ports for RAID purposes and lastly native 10 Gigabit Ethernet. As you read on you will find I didn't quite get what I wanted but for the money it's a steal.

Lets start with performance. In this build I have put an Intel Core i9-9900K, 32 Gigabytes of 

Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000mhz C16 Memory, Samsung 960 EVO 250 Gigabyte M.2 NVMe 2280 and an AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB video card. As you would expect the Intel Core i9-9900K dominates the gaming sector today. With stock settings the CPU just walks away from the AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU in the Cinebench Benchmark proving once again that Intel's dated 14nm process can still kick butt in high performance gaming and multi-threaded workloads. Overclocking is something I plan on doing in the future but for now I am just sticking to the basics.

Moving on to M.2 NVMe drive performance, it's as expected, the Samsung is able to hit its peak performance of over 3000 megabytes per second read but does fall a bit short with only 1400 megabytes per second write.

(Samsung advertises 1900MB/s write). I was very please with these results as I planned to populate all three M.2 slots with the Samsung 960 EVO and two Western Digital 240GB M.2 SSDs which were to be in a RAID0 for super fast storage.

Part of my job in our small office is to move a few terabytes of data around to different machines to then take the data home with me and transfer back-ups of our "Creative Server" onto an off site machine. Doing this with a cloud solution is quite costly so this is my best option for now. Here is where it all goes wrong, I had planned on utilizing six of the available eight SATA3 connections on the motherboard for a larger RAID5 with mechanical drives, I set the drives up for a test run to find out IT CANNOT be done. ASRock decided that instead of  disabling the PCI E lanes associated with 2 x PCI E 3.0 x1 slots they disable six SATA3! Now this is clearly stated on their website under specification

but since I am a loyal ASUS customer, and I am more familiar with their method, I didn't think to check this section. This is a huge letdown because now I have to pop in adapter cards to account the loss of six SATA3 connections in order to use the native raid options but at a loss of the two M.2 slots ASRock offers.

Lastly I'll talk about my favorite feature of this board, Native 10 Gigabit Ethernet by Aquantia. This baby flies! I have been buying up 10gbe switches (Netgear 8-Port Gigabit 2x10gbe, and Buffalo Multi-Gigabit (10gbe) 8 Port Switch) for super fast file transfers. Circling back to my comments before I need to send a very large file (3TB) very quickly for two reasons, one not hold me up waiting seven hours when using mechanical drives and two not to slow down our creative department with the same file transfer. The test speaks for itself, the NIC can handle whatever I throw at it.

To sum up, I was able to grab this board off ebay for $249.99, offered by Newegg, with 10% back in ebay bucks saving me a substantial amount of money. Compare that to the Z390 AORUS MASTER  for $289.99 that does not come with the 10gbe native NIC. I would need to include that for an added price of $98.25 from ASUS making my choice easy for me. This buy is hard to beat! Thanks for reading, I hope this short review helps you better understand the ASRock Z390 Ultimate.