Epilogue
The purpose of this review was two-fold: to fully evaluate the ASRock Taichi mainboard and check the performance improvement with faster RAM (DDR5-8000 vs. DDR5-6000). Because I’m not too fond of extended epilogues, I am sure most of you don’t want to read long paragraphs. The main conclusions of this review are the following:
- The ASRock Z890 Taichi offers interested users a wide range of options. Its build quality is top-notch, and its price is reasonable for what it offers.
- The Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Elite WiFi7 ICE is more efficient than the ASRock Z890 Taichi.
- The DDR5-8000 RAM only provides 5% on all apps and 3.5% game performance improvement.
- A DDR5-6000 kit costs almost half the price of a DDR6-8000 kit.
Pages:
This website needs better software for commenting.
No formatting is possible, no line break, no whatsoever. Where is BBcode for example?
The text was written nicely and readable but is now posted as an unreadable pudding without dots and comma.
Oh man!
sorry we use the standard WordPress editor.
If I were an interested buyer, personally I would still wait 3 – 4 months for Intels’ “magic” bios and driver updatest to appear (which were publicly marketed weeks ago to fix performance and whatever).
Personally I would NOT buy at all, because there is still a HUGE red flag: Intel execs/marketing refuses to answer if this Arrow Lake is the only CPU generation on this socket.
No, a silly refresh in late 2025 with + 5 % performance does not count.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/massive-dell-blunder-leaks-intel-and-nvidias-mobile-roadmaps-nova-lake-panther-lake-cpus-and-genxx-gpus-listed
The Deall leak from this year shows that next-gen Nova Lake architecture will arrive Q4 2026/Q1 2027 and will bring a HUGE update for core count, performance and efficiency.
Both P-cores and E-core will be doubled = 16 + 32.
Other rumors this year (job descriptions) have shown Nova Lake will be the bigget jump since the core architecture 2006.
This is all in line with amd next huge leap which is Zen 6, which will abandon the low-performance, unefficient chiplet-crap introduced with Zen 2, togehter with the ancient crap technology copper wire bonding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ex_gPeWVAo0
Zen 5 is still stupidly overpriced and ancient crap packaging technology. Looking at pro-accelerators as MI300 and reading information on some forums, shows there will be big updates for modern packaging.
Core count is also now rumored to double.
If Intel execs/marketing continue to refuse to answer if Nova Lake will also come for this socket, buying Arrow Lake and this platform is a very very very unwise decision.
Thanks for testing.
Your power consumption tests are the real deal. I see some very different results compared to the other more mainstream testers.
Looks like peak- & average power consumption for both applications and gaming is still not good.
Also good to see you are testing games in 720p resolution. Lots of other testers still test 1080p + maximum graphic testing and don’t want to admit to themselves that in quite some new games even a rtx 4090 bottlenecks.
Critique and improvement proposal is that you don’t specify how you test the games; build-in benchmark or own custom scene= Do it like the testers at pcgameshardware and test with CPU-heavy custom scenes.
Drop the CringeBench 6 benchmark and for media encoding, please add AV01 codec (av1 format).
I would also like to see some power consumption tests for low-utilization applications; so far you only have tested the extreme, which is 100 % utilization. You also don’t specify which applications were used for that.
Another tests showing the E-core performance would be good. Also disabling E-cores and doing some performance tests.
Thanks and good luck.