My thoughts exactly. I'm not really sure why two fans were needed, either. A single 40mm is probably adequate and could have been a standard 3-pin (it isn't like PWM is necessary for a fan that isn't even going to run much)
Make money online from home extra cash more than $18k to $21k. Start getting paid every month Thousands Dollars online. I have received $26K in this month by just working online from home in my part time.every person easily do this job by just open this link and follow details on this page to get started… WWW.iⅭash68.ⅭＯⅯ
For me, for something to qualify for "in the long run" I would want a more future-proof CPU socket (i.e. not Intel's "new socket almost every generation" mantra), but a proprietary fan header is of course unnecessary and annoying as well.
They are getting old for sure - and were never really high end - they just gave truckloads of freebies to influencers. Love their monitors - but the "RoG" is only slightly goofier than "Republic of Tea". I have used Gigabyte since the first gen of Core and haven't looked back or had any problems.
ASUS defaults to the Intel power standards, which means the board is not auto-overclocking the processor full time. You can enable MCE at POST or in the EFI, the scores would be the same or higher.
ASUS defaults to Intel recommended settings for turbo and voltage, and gives users the option to increase these in line with ASUS recommendations to get the best performance. The other manufacturers simply operate with their recommended settings out of the box, hence longer and higher turbos.
Note that Intel actually encourages vendors to set their own turbo length and turbo power - what Intel provides is recommendations, but as long as the MB vendors aren't actually overclocking the frequency, they don't particularly care.
We typically test with out-of-the-box settings, to give a sense of what performance that users without any knowledge of what a turbo power limit is should expect. Given ASUS' implementation, it means they fall down on this metric, which makes it appear if the board is worse. What we should have done in this case is posted both sets of numbers and specified the difference, which is our fault. How ASUS does their options is going to be the focus of our Hero review.
Thank you, Ian! I look forward to it. For my next system I would like ASUS board + card, just to be sure all drivers etc are in line, that is why I am looking at the performance of ASUS boards in particular.
I used to only buy Asus, but i keep hearing crappy things about their ROG lines. To get similar features cost almost double in the current ROG lines vs Giga or MSI.
Seems like the lower Asus lines are ok. What are you guys experiencing?
I got away from Asus. I stuck with them for like 10 years, but in the later years, my Asus boards kept breaking. I swapped to their WS line, which worked for a while, but then it seems they turned crappy too. They'd die in 1 to 1 1/2 years. Maybe I'm just super unlucky with Asus. I just gave up on them and moved to Gigabyte.
Kind of makes me wish Abit was still around and was like their old heyday in the early 2000s. I had a good like 6-7 year run on my old IC7-Max 3 board, until the caps started leaking.
Gotta love how the word "Taichi" totally matches well with the whole brass cogs and gears theme plastered all over the plastic coverings they use to hide the PCB for - well who knows what reason. PCBs in computers must be considered ugly or something. Next stop, PCB-free, RGB-equipped windowed desktop computers!!!
When Jobs started NeXT - even the motherboard went through the aesthetic department.
I support removing polychlorinated biphenyls from desktop computers - almost as insidious as RGB Disco lights. Windows are for cars, boats, airplanes, houses and not for PC cases.
I rather like the look of printed circuit boards in PCs - and the idea that you have several billion precision manufactured features in every CPU.
ASRock have come a long way. I used be an ABit guy before latching on to ASUS up until Haswell. I had the opportunity to get a great deal on ASRock's Supercarrier Z270 paired with a 7700K. Superb board, tons of features, stable and overclocks quite well (5.1 GHz all cores with no effort).
I must say, I miss the glory days of overclocking, i.e. tweaking the hell out of a DFI NF4 + TCCD + BH5 and employing crazy sh!% like the OCZ DDR booster.
It's funny, you had me up until DFI. I had a lan party NF4 board. I hated that thing. It was too difficult to get and keep stable. I wasn't a noob when it came out. Such a disappointment. I like tweaking my stuff, but no thanks. Lol
Can second this. The LAN party NF4 boards were absolute garbage - I had a friend RMA the same one twice, and the entire process took a year. What's the point of having the best OC features if your boards aren't stable at stock settings?
I never said that the DF4 boards were reliable. They were at best betas, but I'll be damned if they didn't overclock like crazy. I've gone through about ~20 boards (NF4, NF4-SLI-DR, NF4-Expert) to find the best ones. It was a crapshoot, but man was it FUN!
Microsoft still hasn't gotten around to nested Hyper-V on AMD -- unless it quietly made it into 2004 that released today.
IGP is pretty useful on Linux still since AMD driver support tends to be late for new graphics architectures. A CPU-only workload on Linux would definitely favor Intel, as cheap AMD GPUs are ancient and Nvidia proprietary drivers are still annoying to use.
You act like the only virtualization solution on Windows is Hyper-V. It's not. It's not a deal breaker for most people. Maybe for you... but not for most people.
IGP support is *equal* today (yes, the year is 2020) with Intel and AMD IGPs. All the way up to Ice Lake and Vega 3xxx APUs. Performance favors AMD IGPs. This support extends to video decoding and encoding, which is equal on both sides.
The NVIDIA driver is painless to use if you use a sane, well-maintained distribution that packages it for you.
Anything else you would like to debate? Some of your statement was true a decade ago, but times have changed for the better.
Honestly this is the most inane post I've ever read. Times haven't changed for the better, Raven Ridge support took over a year after the SoC was released. I own two Raven Ridge devices. I would know.
Even when AMD support hits mainline, it's in such a late kernel version that you better hope this "sane" distro you're referring to is willing to backport support in an update.
Dunno what you mean about the Nvidia driver being painless to use. Its Wayland support is still comparatively unstable in Gnome and pushes KDE Wayland support from mediocre to bad. It also requires extra build tools.
I can't edit posts but I explained a key usage of nested Hyper-V. "Anyone who wants to use the Windows 10X emulator needs it unfortunately." There's also plenty of other features that use Hyper-V these days from WSL2 to Windows Sandbox, so the antiquated views on Hyper-V are also quite dated. Times have changed for the better, and Hyper-V is very much part of the present.
Congrats on your condescension though! It almost masks how wrong you are.
I would love to see UEFI post time AND Windpows clean knstall boot time. My old Asus Rampage V Extreme was very slow (40s post+boot no mem test hybrid) and the new Asus ROG Maximus XII Extreme is also very slow.
My Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master posts+boots in 10+5 seconds.
Why would you be buying new equipment for outdated OS's that aren't supported? If that's the case, the boot time is irrelevant, and my post still stands. Why even bother benchmarking it?
A good read, always a pleasure to peruse Anandtech. The aesthetics are not for everyone but personally I think it's a nice looking board. Out of my price range but Z490 is not for me anyway. As to Asus boards, I have an older Z97 Maximus Hero VII and a Z390 Prime. Both great boards that have given me no significant issues.
Do the new CPUs have an additional 4x lanes from the CPU?
I keep seeing boards that advertise 8,8,4 slots, with all of them coming from the CPU. And this motherboard for example that has the 4x gen 4 M.2, when the chipset does not have Gen 4
The specs I read said the top GPU slot would be capable of PCI-e 4.0 x16, ...and one of the M.2 slots...( perhaps I missed where it said all 4 might be capable fo PCI-e 4.0 x4 operation?_)
Even with the aforementioned limits, more than enough for 99% of most folks....
Waiting to see how many people show up to the comments to wail about the tiny fans. After all, it wasn't anti-AMD sentiment that caused so many folks to show to all of the articles related to X570 boards (and a few that weren't) and do that, it was totally neutral concerns about longevity and noise.
(Full disclosure - I am fully on-board with not wanting tiny fans on a motherboard... just feeling a little amused by the asymmetry of this. The only comment here so far on this topic has been a sensible one, not hysterical ranting.)
So you smugly, disingenuously re-categorize the arguments of others and think you're...clever? Funny? Intelligent?
Now, here's points for asrock that might blow your mind, these are STANDARD FANS. You can go buy brand new noctuas to replace these and silence them while maintaining cooling performance. Guess what you couldnt do with x570 chipset fans? These fans also dont spin 24/7, only when needed, and the VRMs here get a LOT hotter then the x570 chipset did.
If X570 got into the 90C range without the active cooling (it doesnt) and they used standard 40mm fans (they dont) then the complaints would be baseless. But we saw how necessary those x570 fans really were. And oh hey, there are plenty of Z490 mtoherboards that dont use VRM fans! Just like that whole 1 X570 motherboard that cost like $700!
maybe Spunjji is referring to the " if intel does it, its fine, and ok, but if amd does it, its a federal offense and amd should be ridiculed for it. standard 40mm fans or not, most people balk at seeing any type of fan on motherboards now. ive had a few " standard " 40mm fans, and they can be quite loud, louder then the conventional chipset fan.
An only partially related question: has Intel made any statement on how long the new LGA 1200 socket will stay current? At those MB prices, it would be nice to know that one can plug least one more full processor generation into this one.
At $ 370, that's a bit short-term for my taste. Basically, once an MB costs about as much as the CPU, I also look for longevity. That's why I would also hesitate to shell out that kind of money for a socket A MB right now, as I believe AMD will have to update their CPU socket if they want to fully leverage the updated arch in their next generation Ryzen desktop CPUs.
My last month's online earnings was $16953 just by doing very easy and simple job online from home. I am a full time student and doing this online work for 2 to 3 hrs daily online. Awesome job and earning from this are just amazing. Get this today and start making money by follow details........COPY HERE====> www.money87.com
Punch.. oh. We don't do much punching in Tai Chi or Qi Gong. Pushing, ok, it can move us forward, a breath of fresh air, giving rise to the spirit. But probably not punching.
It's a cool headline for a cool motherboard, though.
Visit Bulk Cheap Ammo, a leading ammo directory to find the best Bulk ammo deals from various retailers. We help gun owners provide their favorite ammo on a single page at the best price. We work with the best retailers to provide you with the best ammo deals. Special deals are available on popular calibers. Visit us for more info. https://www.bulkcheapammo.com/bulk-ammo
ASRock's Taichi Motherboards have never found themselves into the same level, league and or performance as ASUS, MSI or GIGABYTE for example. Reviews of "verified buyers" at Amazon are hovering around the 40%-50% level of acceptance. Disappointing. And I do give a lot of credibility to a Amazon buyer who physically worked the ASROCK product. Complaint or not. Better overall pricing at ASROCK has not turned the tide around either. I never owned a ASROCK Mobo but like too. I hope that their marketing (brass cogs & gears themes included) and tech will come around.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
Back to Article
Chaitanya - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Fans with propietary connectors are not a good thing in long run.Samus - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
My thoughts exactly. I'm not really sure why two fans were needed, either. A single 40mm is probably adequate and could have been a standard 3-pin (it isn't like PWM is necessary for a fan that isn't even going to run much)judithesanchez68 - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Make money online from home extra cash more than $18k to $21k. Start getting paid every month Thousands Dollars online. I have received $26K in this month by just working online from home in my part time.every person easily do this job by just open this link and follow details on this page to get started… WWW.iⅭash68.ⅭＯⅯSpunjji - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Agreed, although if you main concern is keeping the board going long-term then you can always splice in the connector yourself.AdditionalPylons - Friday, May 29, 2020 - link
For me, for something to qualify for "in the long run" I would want a more future-proof CPU socket (i.e. not Intel's "new socket almost every generation" mantra), but a proprietary fan header is of course unnecessary and annoying as well.khanikun - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
I don't think it's proprietary. It looks like the standard connectors you see on GPUs.Peskarik - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Why is ASUS ROG so crappy? Last almost everywhere...haukionkannel - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Asus is getting old. Trust old merits... Asus has done quite many poor release in the last year...Deicidium369 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
They are getting old for sure - and were never really high end - they just gave truckloads of freebies to influencers. Love their monitors - but the "RoG" is only slightly goofier than "Republic of Tea". I have used Gigabyte since the first gen of Core and haven't looked back or had any problems.BGentry - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
ASUS defaults to the Intel power standards, which means the board is not auto-overclocking the processor full time. You can enable MCE at POST or in the EFI, the scores would be the same or higher.Peskarik - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Big thanks for the explanation, BGentry.Samus - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Asus is a large OEM manufacturer and just doesn't make anything interesting anymore. That isn't a bad thing, except for innovation.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
ASUS defaults to Intel recommended settings for turbo and voltage, and gives users the option to increase these in line with ASUS recommendations to get the best performance. The other manufacturers simply operate with their recommended settings out of the box, hence longer and higher turbos.Note that Intel actually encourages vendors to set their own turbo length and turbo power - what Intel provides is recommendations, but as long as the MB vendors aren't actually overclocking the frequency, they don't particularly care.
We typically test with out-of-the-box settings, to give a sense of what performance that users without any knowledge of what a turbo power limit is should expect. Given ASUS' implementation, it means they fall down on this metric, which makes it appear if the board is worse. What we should have done in this case is posted both sets of numbers and specified the difference, which is our fault. How ASUS does their options is going to be the focus of our Hero review.
rahvin - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Thanks for the comment Ian. I always do my own setting so I never noticed this, I'm glad you brought it to attention.Peskarik - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Thank you, Ian! I look forward to it. For my next system I would like ASUS board + card, just to be sure all drivers etc are in line, that is why I am looking at the performance of ASUS boards in particular.Byte - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
I used to only buy Asus, but i keep hearing crappy things about their ROG lines. To get similar features cost almost double in the current ROG lines vs Giga or MSI.Seems like the lower Asus lines are ok. What are you guys experiencing?
khanikun - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
I got away from Asus. I stuck with them for like 10 years, but in the later years, my Asus boards kept breaking. I swapped to their WS line, which worked for a while, but then it seems they turned crappy too. They'd die in 1 to 1 1/2 years. Maybe I'm just super unlucky with Asus. I just gave up on them and moved to Gigabyte.Kind of makes me wish Abit was still around and was like their old heyday in the early 2000s. I had a good like 6-7 year run on my old IC7-Max 3 board, until the caps started leaking.
PeachNCream - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Gotta love how the word "Taichi" totally matches well with the whole brass cogs and gears theme plastered all over the plastic coverings they use to hide the PCB for - well who knows what reason. PCBs in computers must be considered ugly or something. Next stop, PCB-free, RGB-equipped windowed desktop computers!!!Deicidium369 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
When Jobs started NeXT - even the motherboard went through the aesthetic department.I support removing polychlorinated biphenyls from desktop computers - almost as insidious as RGB Disco lights. Windows are for cars, boats, airplanes, houses and not for PC cases.
I rather like the look of printed circuit boards in PCs - and the idea that you have several billion precision manufactured features in every CPU.
YB1064 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
ASRock have come a long way. I used be an ABit guy before latching on to ASUS up until Haswell. I had the opportunity to get a great deal on ASRock's Supercarrier Z270 paired with a 7700K. Superb board, tons of features, stable and overclocks quite well (5.1 GHz all cores with no effort).I must say, I miss the glory days of overclocking, i.e. tweaking the hell out of a DFI NF4 + TCCD + BH5 and employing crazy sh!% like the OCZ DDR booster.
Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
I still have a DDR booster :)YB1064 - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Happy to take it off your hands if you don't need it. :)bigboxes - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
It's funny, you had me up until DFI. I had a lan party NF4 board. I hated that thing. It was too difficult to get and keep stable. I wasn't a noob when it came out. Such a disappointment. I like tweaking my stuff, but no thanks. LolSpunjji - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Can second this. The LAN party NF4 boards were absolute garbage - I had a friend RMA the same one twice, and the entire process took a year. What's the point of having the best OC features if your boards aren't stable at stock settings?alufan - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
And third garbage wouldnt overclock worth Toffee even running stock was a challenge all they had was fancy colours and a lot of rave reviewsYB1064 - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
I never said that the DF4 boards were reliable. They were at best betas, but I'll be damned if they didn't overclock like crazy. I've gone through about ~20 boards (NF4, NF4-SLI-DR, NF4-Expert) to find the best ones. It was a crapshoot, but man was it FUN!andanand - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Is there any reason someone would choose an i7 over an AMD cpu at the same price point?lmcd - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Microsoft still hasn't gotten around to nested Hyper-V on AMD -- unless it quietly made it into 2004 that released today.IGP is pretty useful on Linux still since AMD driver support tends to be late for new graphics architectures. A CPU-only workload on Linux would definitely favor Intel, as cheap AMD GPUs are ancient and Nvidia proprietary drivers are still annoying to use.
lmcd - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Nested Hyper-V sounds niche but anyone who wants to use the Windows 10X emulator needs it unfortunately.mooninite - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Hi, let's calm down on the FUD.You act like the only virtualization solution on Windows is Hyper-V. It's not. It's not a deal breaker for most people. Maybe for you... but not for most people.
IGP support is *equal* today (yes, the year is 2020) with Intel and AMD IGPs. All the way up to Ice Lake and Vega 3xxx APUs. Performance favors AMD IGPs. This support extends to video decoding and encoding, which is equal on both sides.
The NVIDIA driver is painless to use if you use a sane, well-maintained distribution that packages it for you.
Anything else you would like to debate? Some of your statement was true a decade ago, but times have changed for the better.
lmcd - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Honestly this is the most inane post I've ever read. Times haven't changed for the better, Raven Ridge support took over a year after the SoC was released. I own two Raven Ridge devices. I would know.Even when AMD support hits mainline, it's in such a late kernel version that you better hope this "sane" distro you're referring to is willing to backport support in an update.
Dunno what you mean about the Nvidia driver being painless to use. Its Wayland support is still comparatively unstable in Gnome and pushes KDE Wayland support from mediocre to bad. It also requires extra build tools.
I can't edit posts but I explained a key usage of nested Hyper-V. "Anyone who wants to use the Windows 10X emulator needs it unfortunately." There's also plenty of other features that use Hyper-V these days from WSL2 to Windows Sandbox, so the antiquated views on Hyper-V are also quite dated. Times have changed for the better, and Hyper-V is very much part of the present.
Congrats on your condescension though! It almost masks how wrong you are.
Dug - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Why in the world do you insist on benchmarking Non-UEFI POST Time when no one will use that?TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Because not everyone is you and there are those of us that DO use it. Wow, what an amazing thought.Dorkaman - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
I would love to see UEFI post time AND Windpows clean knstall boot time. My old Asus Rampage V Extreme was very slow (40s post+boot no mem test hybrid) and the new Asus ROG Maximus XII Extreme is also very slow.My Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master posts+boots in 10+5 seconds.
Dug - Wednesday, June 3, 2020 - link
Why would you be buying new equipment for outdated OS's that aren't supported?If that's the case, the boot time is irrelevant, and my post still stands. Why even bother benchmarking it?
Ranger1065 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
A good read, always a pleasure to peruse Anandtech. The aesthetics are not for everyone but personally I think it's a nice looking board. Out of my price range but Z490 is not for me anyway. As to Asus boards, I have an older Z97 Maximus Hero VII and a Z390 Prime. Both great boards that have given me no significant issues.Jorgp2 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Do the new CPUs have an additional 4x lanes from the CPU?I keep seeing boards that advertise 8,8,4 slots, with all of them coming from the CPU. And this motherboard for example that has the 4x gen 4 M.2, when the chipset does not have Gen 4
MDD1963 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
The specs I read said the top GPU slot would be capable of PCI-e 4.0 x16, ...and one of the M.2 slots...( perhaps I missed where it said all 4 might be capable fo PCI-e 4.0 x4 operation?_)Even with the aforementioned limits, more than enough for 99% of most folks....
Spunjji - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Waiting to see how many people show up to the comments to wail about the tiny fans. After all, it wasn't anti-AMD sentiment that caused so many folks to show to all of the articles related to X570 boards (and a few that weren't) and do that, it was totally neutral concerns about longevity and noise.(Full disclosure - I am fully on-board with not wanting tiny fans on a motherboard... just feeling a little amused by the asymmetry of this. The only comment here so far on this topic has been a sensible one, not hysterical ranting.)
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
So you smugly, disingenuously re-categorize the arguments of others and think you're...clever? Funny? Intelligent?Now, here's points for asrock that might blow your mind, these are STANDARD FANS. You can go buy brand new noctuas to replace these and silence them while maintaining cooling performance. Guess what you couldnt do with x570 chipset fans? These fans also dont spin 24/7, only when needed, and the VRMs here get a LOT hotter then the x570 chipset did.
If X570 got into the 90C range without the active cooling (it doesnt) and they used standard 40mm fans (they dont) then the complaints would be baseless. But we saw how necessary those x570 fans really were. And oh hey, there are plenty of Z490 mtoherboards that dont use VRM fans! Just like that whole 1 X570 motherboard that cost like $700!
Korguz - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
maybe Spunjji is referring to the " if intel does it, its fine, and ok, but if amd does it, its a federal offense and amd should be ridiculed for it. standard 40mm fans or not, most people balk at seeing any type of fan on motherboards now. ive had a few " standard " 40mm fans, and they can be quite loud, louder then the conventional chipset fan.Deicidium369 - Saturday, May 30, 2020 - link
I don't like whiny little fans, regardless of what they are on.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
An only partially related question: has Intel made any statement on how long the new LGA 1200 socket will stay current? At those MB prices, it would be nice to know that one can plug least one more full processor generation into this one.Ranger1065 - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
11th gen Rocket Lake-S Cpus are supposed to be compatible with Z490/LGA 1200 so perhaps one more generation...eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
At $ 370, that's a bit short-term for my taste. Basically, once an MB costs about as much as the CPU, I also look for longevity. That's why I would also hesitate to shell out that kind of money for a socket A MB right now, as I believe AMD will have to update their CPU socket if they want to fully leverage the updated arch in their next generation Ryzen desktop CPUs.eastcoast_pete - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
AM4 socket, of course. Edit function would be nice.wisalin940 - Saturday, May 30, 2020 - link
My last month's online earnings was $16953 just by doing very easy and simple job online from home. I am a full time student and doing this online work for 2 to 3 hrs daily online. Awesome job and earning from this are just amazing. Get this today and start making money by follow details........COPY HERE====> www.money87.comdumanfu - Thursday, June 4, 2020 - link
Why it has opposed M2 slots? On AMD boards the PCIe slots support both pcie4 and 3 as the expected from specswatersb - Friday, June 5, 2020 - link
Punch.. oh. We don't do much punching in Tai Chi or Qi Gong. Pushing, ok, it can move us forward, a breath of fresh air, giving rise to the spirit. But probably not punching.It's a cool headline for a cool motherboard, though.
bulkammo - Tuesday, June 9, 2020 - link
Visit Bulk Cheap Ammo, a leading ammo directory to find the best Bulk ammo deals from various retailers. We help gun owners provide their favorite ammo on a single page at the best price. We work with the best retailers to provide you with the best ammo deals. Special deals are available on popular calibers. Visit us for more info.https://www.bulkcheapammo.com/bulk-ammo
Akuchukwu - Wednesday, July 1, 2020 - link
Nice hardware, more tech info can be seen here <a href="http://jobadung.com/">here</a>Tom Sunday - Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - link
ASRock's Taichi Motherboards have never found themselves into the same level, league and or performance as ASUS, MSI or GIGABYTE for example. Reviews of "verified buyers" at Amazon are hovering around the 40%-50% level of acceptance. Disappointing. And I do give a lot of credibility to a Amazon buyer who physically worked the ASROCK product. Complaint or not. Better overall pricing at ASROCK has not turned the tide around either. I never owned a ASROCK Mobo but like too. I hope that their marketing (brass cogs & gears themes included) and tech will come around.(