The ASRock Z490 Taichi Motherboard Review: Punching LGA1200 Into Life
by Gavin Bonshor on May 27, 2020 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
For Z490 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1909 update.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
F1 2018
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained. We use the in-game benchmark, set to run on the Montreal track in the wet, driving as Lewis Hamilton from last place on the grid. Data is taken over a one-lap race.
Strange Brigade (DX12)
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.
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Peskarik - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Big thanks for the explanation, BGentry.Samus - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Asus is a large OEM manufacturer and just doesn't make anything interesting anymore. That isn't a bad thing, except for innovation.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
ASUS defaults to Intel recommended settings for turbo and voltage, and gives users the option to increase these in line with ASUS recommendations to get the best performance. The other manufacturers simply operate with their recommended settings out of the box, hence longer and higher turbos.Note that Intel actually encourages vendors to set their own turbo length and turbo power - what Intel provides is recommendations, but as long as the MB vendors aren't actually overclocking the frequency, they don't particularly care.
We typically test with out-of-the-box settings, to give a sense of what performance that users without any knowledge of what a turbo power limit is should expect. Given ASUS' implementation, it means they fall down on this metric, which makes it appear if the board is worse. What we should have done in this case is posted both sets of numbers and specified the difference, which is our fault. How ASUS does their options is going to be the focus of our Hero review.
rahvin - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Thanks for the comment Ian. I always do my own setting so I never noticed this, I'm glad you brought it to attention.Peskarik - Thursday, May 28, 2020 - link
Thank you, Ian! I look forward to it. For my next system I would like ASUS board + card, just to be sure all drivers etc are in line, that is why I am looking at the performance of ASUS boards in particular.Byte - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
I used to only buy Asus, but i keep hearing crappy things about their ROG lines. To get similar features cost almost double in the current ROG lines vs Giga or MSI.Seems like the lower Asus lines are ok. What are you guys experiencing?
khanikun - Tuesday, June 2, 2020 - link
I got away from Asus. I stuck with them for like 10 years, but in the later years, my Asus boards kept breaking. I swapped to their WS line, which worked for a while, but then it seems they turned crappy too. They'd die in 1 to 1 1/2 years. Maybe I'm just super unlucky with Asus. I just gave up on them and moved to Gigabyte.Kind of makes me wish Abit was still around and was like their old heyday in the early 2000s. I had a good like 6-7 year run on my old IC7-Max 3 board, until the caps started leaking.
PeachNCream - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
Gotta love how the word "Taichi" totally matches well with the whole brass cogs and gears theme plastered all over the plastic coverings they use to hide the PCB for - well who knows what reason. PCBs in computers must be considered ugly or something. Next stop, PCB-free, RGB-equipped windowed desktop computers!!!Deicidium369 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
When Jobs started NeXT - even the motherboard went through the aesthetic department.I support removing polychlorinated biphenyls from desktop computers - almost as insidious as RGB Disco lights. Windows are for cars, boats, airplanes, houses and not for PC cases.
I rather like the look of printed circuit boards in PCs - and the idea that you have several billion precision manufactured features in every CPU.
YB1064 - Wednesday, May 27, 2020 - link
ASRock have come a long way. I used be an ABit guy before latching on to ASUS up until Haswell. I had the opportunity to get a great deal on ASRock's Supercarrier Z270 paired with a 7700K. Superb board, tons of features, stable and overclocks quite well (5.1 GHz all cores with no effort).I must say, I miss the glory days of overclocking, i.e. tweaking the hell out of a DFI NF4 + TCCD + BH5 and employing crazy sh!% like the OCZ DDR booster.