ASRock already impressed me with its B650E Taichi LITE offering and the Z790 variant turned out to be a bigger surprise. You are getting the same overclocking capabilities and high-end I/O out of this $349 US motherboard which is simply insane. The Intel Z790 motherboards allow users to support 3 generations of Intel Core CPUs and the Taichi LITE already has BIOS support for the Raptor Lake Refresh "14th Gen" CPU family which is expected to launch in the coming months.
The motherboard can support really fast DDR5 memory, the support goes up to DDR5-7200 but you can definitely squeeze out more out of this bad boy. Plus, all the goodies of the original Taichi are there such as Lightning USB 4 ports, 60W Power Delivery, huge storage expansion capabilities with quad M.2 slots (including One Gen5), and 8 SATA III ports. Each M.2 slot is cooled by heatsinks and the PCIe slots offer additional AIC expansion including a full-length Gen5 capable slot. For net working, you get WIFI 6E and BT 5.2 along with dual LAN ports (2.5 GbE + 1 GBe).
The Taichi LITE series is a great value in my opinion and if you are looking for a high-end Intel board that has all the bells and whistles, then the $349 US Z790 Taichi LITE from ASRock should be your first choice. I highly recommend pairing this motherboard with a Core i9 and Core i7 CPU as it can really unlock the full potential of these chips with its superb overclocking prowess.
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