ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara Motherboard Review: ASRock Rocks With White Marble

Board Features

The ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara is a mid-range to high-end E-ATX motherboard, which bridges the gap between ASRock's Steel Legend and Phantom Gaming series with the halo ASRock Z690 Aqua. The Taichi series in itself is a premium range of motherboards, whereas the Z790 Taichi Carrara has the same feature set as the regular Taichi; it is different with its white Carrara marbled styled aesthetics.

As a premium LGA1700 motherboard designed for Intel's 13th Gen and 12th Gen Core series processors, it does support PCIe 5.0, with two full-length PCIe 5.0 slots that can operate at x16/x0 or x8/x8, while ASRock includes a single full-length PCIe 4.0 x4 slot which is driven by the Z790 chipset. There are four memory slots with support for up to and including DDR5-7400 memory, and they can accommodate a maximum of 192 GB.

Regarding cooling support, there are 8 x 4-pin fan headers, with one specifically for a CPU fan, one acting as an optional CPU fan and water pump, and six 4-pin headers for chassis fans, although all the headers can support water cooling pumps.

In terms of storage, the ASRock Z790 Taichi has one PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slot, with four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, and eight SATA ports; all of the SATA ports can support RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. On the rear panel, ASRock includes plenty of connectivity, including dual Thunderbolt 4 Type-C ports, which can double up as video outputs for additional and compatible monitors. For conventional monitors, there is one HDMI 2.1 video output. ASRock also includes six USB 3.2 G2 Type-A ports and two USB 2.0 ports, while a USB 3.2 G2x2 10 Gbps header is available to use for chassis with a compatible front panel.

The ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara has a decent networking array, including two Ethernet ports, one controlled by a Killer E3100 2.5 GbE controller and the other by an Intel I219-V Gigabit controller. For wireless, ASRock includes a Killer AX1690 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi with support for wireless and BT 5.3 connectivity. 

In keeping in line with other mid-range to premium Z790 motherboards, ASRock has a decent on-board audio configuration with a Realtek ALC4082 HD audio codec doing much of the audio processing, with an assisting ESS Sabre 9218 DAC providing an uprated experience for users with good quality headphones. As such, ASRock offers just two 3.5 mm audio jacks and a single S/PDIF optical output.

Test Bed

With some of the nuances with Intel's Raptor Lake processors, including the use of P and E-cores, our policy is to see if the system gives an automatic option to increase the power limits of the processor. If it does, we select the liquid cooling option. If it does not, we do not change the defaults.

We must also thank the following:

Hardware Providers for CPU and Motherboard Reviews
Sapphire RX 460 Nitro	MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC	Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs	Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs
G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX	Crucial Ballistix DDR4	Silverstone Coolers	Noctua Coolers