The ASRock Z370 Taichi Motherboard Review: Competitive at $220, Aggressive at $190

Gaming Performance

AoTS Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity is a Real Time Strategy game developed by Oxide Games and Stardock Entertainment. The original AoTS was released back in March of 2016 while the standalone expansion pack, Escalation, was released in November of 2016 adding more structures, maps, and units. We use this specific benchmark as it relies on both a good GPU as well as on the CPU in order to get the most frames per second. This balance is able to better display any system differences in gaming as opposed to a more GPU heavy title where the CPU and system don't matter quite as much. We use the default "Crazy" in-game settings using the DX11 rendering path in both 1080p and 4K UHD resolutions. The benchmark is run four times and the results averaged then plugged into the graph. 

Our AOTSe results here on the Z370 platform are just as close together as our results on the X299 platform. The results can tell us AOTSe can do all of its work with a 6c/12t processor without losing a step to the higher thread count CPUs. The Z370 Taichi managed 45.8 FPS in 1080p and 33.6 FPS in 4K. The results here are on the faster side of results but nothing out of the ordinary. 

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.

One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.

Rise of the Tomb Raider results showed a marked improvement using the latest updated OS, microcode and ensuring the HPET timing is off. The Taichi ran at 100FPS in 1080p and 40.2 in 4K UHD. The 1080p result is over 7% faster than the next highest, while the 40.2 result is a bit less than 10% faster.