ASRock Reveals More Details About its Range of X670E Motherboards

Although there was a leak with a partial picture of the ASRock X670E Taichi board just days before Computex 2022 kicked off, it was hard to draw any real conclusions from it. The company has revealed more details about it, alongside the X670E Taichi Carrara, X670E Steel Legend and the X670E Pro RS. Let’s start with the plain X670E Taichi, since this was the board that leaked. As is obvious now, the board doesn’t feature a fan on the chipset heatsink, but rather a set of cogs, something we’ve seen before from ASRock. The board has very limited expansion options when it comes to PCIe slots, with a pair of x16 slots, which are sharing the 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU and that’s it. ASRock has gone for four M.2 slots, of which one is PCIe 5.0, most likely the one next to the memory slots. Interestingly, ASRock has kitted out the X670E Taichi with Thunderbolt 4, which means we’re looking at an Intel chip here and there should also be support for USB4 and the two ports are located around the back of the board.ASRock has also kitted out the X670E Taichi with a front mounted header for a USB Type-C Gen 3.2 2×2 (20 Gbps) port, an HDMI port, multiple USB-A ports, eight SATA ports, a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port and WiFi 6E, powered by Intel’s Killer branded NICs, as well as a Realtek ALC4082 audio solution, paired up with an ESS Sabre 9218 DAC for the headphone jack. The board also has at least half a dozen fan connectors, a couple of USB 3.0 headers, a debug LED and the usual power, reset and clear CMOS buttons you find on higher-end motherboards. Finally the board has a 26 phase SPS Dr.MOS power design.

The X670E Taichi Carrara is a special edition of the regular X670E Taichi which was created to celebrate ASRock’s 20th anniversary. It carries over all the features from the regular Taichi model, but adds some rather unusual heatsink and rear I/O covers that have a marble effect, something we’ve never seen on a motherboard before, hence the name of the board.

Next up we have the X670E Steel Legend, although ASRock didn’t provide a detailed picture of the board, but the specs does at least give us an idea of what to expect. The board should have a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, as well as a single PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, as well as four M.2 slots, again one of the PCIe 5.0 variety and four PCIe 4.0. The Steel Legend also has an HDMI and DP port, four SATA ports, a rear port and a front header for USB-C Gen 3.2 2×2 (20 Gbps), a Realtek Dragon 2.5 Gbps Ethernet controller, as well as a 1 Gbps Intel Ethernet controller and an unspecified WiFi 6E and Bluetooth module. The audio is based on a Realtek ALC1220 audio codec and finally there’s an 18 phase power design.

The final board in the lineup is the X670E Pro RS, which is likely to be one of the cheapest X670E based boards. Here ASRock has yet again gone for a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, but the two other PCIe 4.0 slots are only of the x1 variety. The board still has a PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot, plus three PCIe 4.0 and one PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 slot, which is shared with two of the six SATA ports. There’s also a single rear mounted USB-C Gen 3.2 2×2 (20 Gbps port), a Realtek Dragon 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port and a front mounted USB-C header. For whatever reason, ASRock fitted an antiquated Realtek ALC897 audio codec, which is not something we expected to see on this level of board. Although there’s no onboard WiFi out of the box, ASRock did include an M.2 E-keyed slot for one. ASRock went with a 16 phase power design here, which is kind of expected on a lower-end board.