ASRock X370 Taichi Motherboard Review

1. Introduction2. ASRock X370 Taichi: Packaging and Bundle3. ASRock X370 Taichi: Board Layout and Features4. ASRock X370 UEFI5. ASRock X370 Software6. Testing Methodology7. Tests: CPU Related8. Tests: Memory & System Related9. Tests: Gaming Related10. Overclocking & Power Consumption11. Tests: Motherboard Features Performance12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark is a Windows-based utility for testing storage performance of any storage drive or controller. We use the default benchmark setup.

M.2 PCIe Performance

For M.2 testing we use a Toshiba OCZ RD400 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD.

Despite a lack of cooling, transfer rate performance from the CPU-fed M.2 PCIe slot is superb. We did not observe any signs of thermal throttling when used alongside a Noctua NH-D15 CPU cooler that was giving the RD400 SSD incidental airflow.

ASRock's secondary M.2 slot is limited to around 1.6GBps, making it suitable for older SSDs or write-heavy scenarios where 1.6GBps is a high performance perch, even by today's standards.

USB 3.0 5Gbps Performance

We test USB 3.0 performance using a pair of Corsair Force LE 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps Performance

We test USB 3.1 performance using a pair of Corsair Force LE 120GB SSDs in RAID 0 connected to an Icy Box RD2253-U31 2-bay USB 3.1 enclosure powered by an ASMedia ASM1352R controller.

A settings bug made it impossible to run USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps transfer rate tests due to instability with the ports. As such, we implemented a manual fix shown in the above screenshot. For any users experiencing USB 3.1 Gen 2 problems, we would recommend attempting the above manual solution.

Performance from the X370-based 10Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 ports on ASRock's X370 Taichi is good. The numbers were a touch behind those of Gigabyte's competitor but not by a significant level.

SATA 6Gbps Performance

For SATA 6Gbps testing we use a SK Hynix SE3010 960GB SSD.

SATA 6Gbps performance is as we would expect. The add-on ASM1061 chipset ports are slower than any of the eight delivered by AMD's X370 chipset and should therefore be used for slower mechanical storage as a last resort.

WiFi Performance

For Wireless-AC testing we manually transfer a large video file between the test system and our GbE UnRaid server (with a SSD cache drive).

Performance from the Intel Wireless-AC 3168 single-stream adapter was decent. The 433Mbps-rated device delivered around half of its theoretical performance in our file transfer test. This was at a distance of around 4 metres in a test environment cluttered with wireless signals.

As such, the WiFi looks to be reasonably capable of saturating even the fastest of UK-based internet connections but it will represent a serious slow-down to users transferring files on an internal GbE-capable network.

Audio

Rightmark Audio Analyser is a freeware benchmarking utility designed to objectively test the performance characteristics of audio solutions. We setup a line-in line-out loop and execute the record/playback test before generating the results report you see below. A sampling mode of 24-bit, 192 kHz was tested.

According to RMAA, overall performance from ASRock's Purity Sound 4 system is ‘Excellent‘.

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