THE Z890 TAICHI LITE

The Z890 Taichi Lite is an ATX sized motherboard with a black and silver color theme.

The medium sized heatsinks ASRock has placed should be quite sufficient for the MOSFET/VRMs.

The four UDIMM DDR5 slots support CUDIMM modules and can hold up to a total of 256GB with a max speed of 9600MHz (MT/s) and over (this motherboard also has power on/off and reset buttons on its upper right corner). The OC memory shield you see located between the DDR5 slots and the CPU slot should provide improved stability when using very fast RAM (or when overclocking).

Once again, we find two 8-pin power ports aside the main 24-pin one.

A few years back 4 SATA ports wouldn't be considered a lot but with the arrival of M.2 drives they are plenty.

The Z890 Taichi Lite features just two PCIe x16 ports.

ASRock has used a tool-less heatsink for the top (Gen5) M.2 SSD spot.

However, from the 6 total M.2 ports just 4 come with heatsinks over them.

There's a 7th M.2 port present on the Z890 Taichi Lite which is taken by the Intel 2x2 Wi-Fi 7 Module.

The rear I/O includes a single HDMI v2.1 port, two antenna ports, two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports,  four USB 3.2 Gen2 ports, clear CMOS and BIOS flashback buttons, four USB 3.2 Gen1 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, 5Gbps RJ45 port, 2.5Gbps RJ45 port and the high definition onboard audio ports.

Turning the motherboard over we see that it has no protective backplate.

Just like with the MSI Z890 Tomahawk WiFi review I'll be using the Kingston FURY Renegade Limited Edition 48GB 8GHz CL36 dual-channel kit and the Intel Core Ultra 285k.