Today we are checking out a rather colourful motherboard from ASRock. This is ASRock B550 Taichi RAZER Edition. As you have probably already guessed – it’s a collaboration with Razer. The board is designed to work with AMD AM4 socket and supports the new Ryzen 5000 CPUs. Let’s talk about it.
First of all let’s cover CPU support. This board will work with any older 3000 series CPUs, 4000G series chips (if you can somehow find them) and of course the new Ryzen 5000 series, just make sure you have the latest BIOS installed.
To feed the CPU we have 16 Phase VRM with pretty beefy heatsinks. The power delivery is done via 8+8 pin connectors at the top. On the right we have four DIMM slots supporting dual channel DDR4 memory with speeds up to 5200MHz and a maximum capacity of 128GB.
For a full list of compatible CPUs and RAM I would really recommend checking out ASRocks website.
Back to the board – here we find three PCIE Gen 4 x16 slots as well as 2 PCIE Gen 3 x1 slots so there are plenty of expansion options.
Underneath the shroud and heatsinks there are two M.2 slots, the top one running at PCIE Gen 4 and bottom one is PCIE Gen 3 or it can be set to a Sata 3 mode. On the side we have another 8 Sata ports.
Across the board we have 7 fan headers and 4 RGB headers, two of which are addressable 5V type and two are standard 12V type.
On the right hand side we have onboard USB 3.2 gen 1 headers, two of which are for type A and one for type C port.
As a person who likes to tinker with the kit and overclock the PC I am a big fan of power plus reset buttons paired with debug LEDs at the bottom of the board as well as clear CMOS and BIOS flashback at the rear IO panel.
Speaking of the rear panel – here we have a nice array of ports, including display port 1.4 as well as HDMI 2.1 and a bunch of USB ports. For communication we have 2.5 Gigabit ethernet and two antenna ports that are used by the supported Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1
To top all of this off we have a nice selection of audio connections.
So with all of this said, what is the difference between the original Taichi and the Razer Edition? As far as the performance goes – both are the same, but Razer edition has a nice bit of a twist to it via the sleek design with custom RGB placement on the board as well as RGB integration support.
I personally really like the clean look of it. It’s a bit of a head-scratcher why they spent the time putting some sort of design above the chipset though as it is instantly covered up by a graphics card, but, hey, it does look good in product pages.
Overall this is a great fully featured board that will be a good fit for any enthusiast. If on the other hand you require more high speed USBs or want to have multiple PCIE Gen 4 drives then you are in luck as ASRock is also releasing the x570 Taichi Razer Edition. Go check it out!
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