ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite review

For over two decades, ASRock has been designing and manufacturing motherboards for desktop PCs, workstations, and servers. The first use of the model name Taichi appeared in 2016 with the X99 Taichi, and since then, every new chipset released has been given the Taichi treatment.

As part of ASRock's motherboard range for Intel Core Ultra 200S processors, the Z890 Taichi Lite is the cheapest of the Taichi line-up but it's not exactly a mainstream offering. With a retail price of $400, the Z890 Taichi Lite is certainly expensive, though there are far pricier Z890 boards around.

So what exactly is one getting for four hundred notes, and compared to ASRock's Z890 Taichi, what's so 'Lite' about it? Well, the former is around $90 more expensive but you get more substantial VRM and SSD heatsinks, an additional M.2 SSD expansion card, and that's about it. The rest of the specifications are identical, other than the fact that the Taichi Lite has silver/white heatsinks to the Z890 Taichi's black/purple colour scheme.

And speaking of specifications, you get a lot with the Z890 Taichi Lite. At first glance, that might not seem to be the case, as there are only two PCIe slots on the board—one for your graphics card and one for an expansion card. However, the lack of PCIe slots is balanced by the fact that there are six M.2 slots, one being Gen5 x4 and the rest all being Gen4 x4.

One of the Gen4 slots will be disabled if you use the second PCIe slot, but at least all the PCIe and M.2 slots are all full-speed. Some Z890 motherboards sport more PCIe slots, but they'll often be a slower Gen or more commonly, they have fewer M.2 slots. Here, you're getting a veritable smorgasbord of storage options.

In terms of connectivity, it's almost as impressive. The rear IO panel sports 12 USB ports, but there are no 20 Gbps USB 3.2 ports. At least you get two Thunderbolt 4/USB4 40 Gbps sockets to use if you do need blistering transfer speeds. Frustratingly, the USB ports aren't grouped by speed on the rear panel and the colouring is misleading.

Underneath each LAN socket, there are two USB Type-A connections. The one closest to the LAN is a 5 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 1 port, whereas the bottom one is 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2. The ports coloured in yellow are ASRock's 'Lightning Gaming Ports', where each socket is connected to a different controller to reduce input lag.

I can't say I've ever experienced any issues having a keyboard and mouse connected to the same USB controller, and I'd have preferred ASRock to have grouped the USB ports by actual transfer performance.

You also get WiFi 7, and while that might not sound worth having, if you have a router that only supports WiFi 6, for example, every WiFi 7-enabled motherboard I've tested so far has better download performance than older systems. Not just in terms of peak throughput but also sustained transfer rate.

In terms of niceties, you get a quick-release heatsink for the main SSD and PCIe slots, power and reset buttons on the board, and an LED display for BIOS codes (super useful for diagnosing problems). However, the other SSD heatsink only covers three slots—the remaining two are open to the air, so if you do fit them with a fast NVMe drive, you'll need to make sure they have their own heatsinks.

Benchmarks and performance

PC Gamer test bench
CPU: Intel Core Ultra 9 285K | Cooler: MSI MAG Coreliquid I360 | RAM: 32 GB Lexar Thor OC DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: Corsair RM850x Shift 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Acer XB280HK

Arrow Lake motherboards have gone through a torrent of BIOS updates since first appearing in October 2024, and Windows 11 has also seen similar tweaks for improving Core Ultra 200S processor performance. The ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite sample was issued with a very old BIOS, so I flashed it to v2.19, the main recent non-beta one.

I also retested the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk (an Arrow Lake launch review sample motherboard) with its latest BIOS, but I've included original figures for an Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero, marked with an asterisk, to show how things have improved since last year.

Although I've only tested a relatively small number of Z890 motherboards, compared to the vast number available on the market, one thing has become very clear. There's far more variability in how well these motherboards cope in gaming situations than there should be. In theory, every Z890 model should be roughly the same, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

I tried several BIOS versions with the Taichi Lite to see if the gaming performance could be improved, and while more recent ones are much better than those from last year, it's still not as good as it should be. For example, in our Factorio benchmark, the Taichi Lite took 11% longer to complete the updates than the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice. That said, at least it was no worse than the MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk.

The gaming performance isn't bad but for the money, you'd expect better or at the very least, parity with the Gigabyte motherboard. The fact that it's $110 more expensive than the Aorus Elite doesn't make it an ideal choice for a gaming-only Arrow Lake PC.

The Taichi Lite's gaming performance could be forgiven if it was a market leader in productivity and content creation tasks, but it's no better in these scenarios. The 7zip compression results suggest that ASRock is using settings in the motherboard's firmware, or perhaps even its design, that aren't maximising the Core Ultra 9 285K's memory and cache system.

File compression works system memory hard, so any weaknesses in RAM timings and signalling will show up here, and once again, the Gigabyte model is better than the Taichi Lite. In fact, it's barely any quicker than the Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero board, which was using a first-release BIOS and a version of Windows that doesn't have all of the latest Arrow Lake updates.

The most disappointing aspect of the ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite is its cooling systems for the power delivery components (VRMs). All of the motherboards were tested in an open chassis (picture a metal frame with the board attached to it) and most PCs will have a surfeit of cooling fans blowing air across a motherboard's heatsinks.

To see if this would improve matters with the Taichi Lite, I added a 140 mm directly above the VRM heatsinks and repeated the tests. The lowest I could get the temperatures down to was 50 °C, which is no better than what the Gigabyte and Asus boards achieved with no active cooling.

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Now, the issue could just be with this particular sample sent for review, but I couldn't see anything wrong with the heatsink mountings. It's possible that the thermal pads used aren't up to the job and if that's the case, then there's a good chance that every Taichi Lite board is like this.

At least it handled the heat from a Gen5 SSD under full load pretty well. Not as good as the Asus and Gigabyte boards, but it's better than the MSI. The main SSD heatsink isn't especially big, but there are two thermal pads, one for each side of the SSD, and I suspect this is what's helping here. The heatsink's quick release mechanism is simple to use, and it firmly attaches to the SSD.

Conclusion

If you've read through this review to the very end, absorbing all the details in the above charts, you'll almost certainly have to come to the same conclusion as me as to whether the ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite is worth buying.

At $400, it's considerably more expansion than the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 Ice and MSI MAG Z890 Tomahawk, so you'd expect it to offer more features and/or performance. The latter isn't there but what about the former? Well, six full-speed M.2 slots is going to be very nice for some PC users (I'm very much in that camp) and it's two more than the Gigabyte and MSI models.

It also sports more USB ports on the rear IO panel, though not as many as the hugely expensive Asus ROG Maximus Z890 Hero. I don't think they're organized or labelled very well, but along with the dual LAN ports and WiFi 7 module, the Taichi Lite is well equipped in terms of connectivity.

The question to answer, though, is whether the extra M.2 slots and USB ports are worth $100. I would say it's just about okay—one could purchase PCIe M.2 and USB expansion cards for the same amount of money and get the extra connects and storage that way, but here, they're already available. Of course, the Taichi Lite only has one spare PCIe slot, whereas the Gigabyte and MSI boards have two apiece.

However, the weak VRM cooling isn't ideal, and although the temperatures are well below any thermal limits, I do have concerns that it's not up to scratch for any serious overclocking (not that Arrow Lake chips overclock particularly well). If ASRock is able to squeeze a bit more performance out of its Z890 Taichi Lite via BIOS revisions, it'd have a feature-rich model on its hands, albeit a rather pricey one.

For some PC users, this could be an ideal Z890 motherboard, but if you're just looking at gaming use only, then the ASRock Z890 Taichi Lite isn't the board to pick.