Introduction

Motherboards aimed at extreme overclockers are rare, usually being premium items at a time when CPUs are often pushed to near their limits out of the box. However, once you start using extreme forms of cooling, there’s usually plenty more headroom and Intel’s Core Ultra Arrow Lake CPUs have certainly proven themselves to be willing overclockers. The ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF aims to give you the best of both worlds, with the physical tools and design to be a weekend extreme cooling warrior, but happily handle gaming and content creation as well as provide the latest features and connectivity as your daily driver.

Thanks to some clever design and layout choices, ASRock has done this with the Z890 Taichi OCF without many compromises. In fact, it has more features in some areas than some standard boards we’ve looked at recently. Thunderbolt 4 is here as is PCIe Gen 5 GPU and SSD support, Wi-Fi 7 and five M.2 ports, all while offering a bunch of features to make those extreme overclocking sessions go a little more smoothly.

That’s not to say this is a board for anyone that’s not even been into the EFI of a motherboard before, but even if you have modest cooling, many of the features on offer will make overclocking easier and more fun, while it has plenty of higher-end features to keep things moving and stable when things go sub-zero. We’ll be looking at just how well ASRock strikes the balance and whether enthusiastic overclockers will be better off looking at a standard board, such as others in ASRock’s excellent Taichi series.

Specifications

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