PCMark
Starting with PCMark to see how the Taichi Lite stacks up compared to the competition, and straight away, it’s not off to the best start with a score of 9207 points, which does put it 10% behind the next best result, though does come in 2% better than the worst performing board, the MSI MEG Z890 ACE.
Cinebench 2024
Moving over to Cinebench, things are looking much better, with a single-core score that comes within a margin of all other boards tested, and matches both the Tomahawk Wi-Fi from MSI and AORUS Elite Wi-Fi 7 from Gigabyte. The multi-core score is also on the strong side, falling just a few points behind the Z890 Maximus Hero from ASUS.
AIDA64
In AIDA64, the results are on the stronger side of the scale in terms of the read and copy speeds, while the write bandwidth test does show the performance faltering slightly, though nothing that would be a cause for concern. The better result comes by way of the latency, which comes in with the lowest score we’ve seen from all of the boards tested.
Super Pi
Switching over to Super PI, and again, the Taichi Lite is on the better end of the scale at 340 seconds, which is the second-best result that we’ve seen and rivals some more expensive boards like the Z890 Maximus Hero from ASUS.
Y-Cruncher
In Y-Cruncher, the Taichi Lite lines up perfectly with other Z890 boards that we tested with a score of 165.193 seconds in single-core and 17.891 seconds in the multi-core score.
Gaming
As we look at gaming performance, in Spider-Man Remastered, the Taichi Lite sits middle of the road at 211 FPS in the averages and 153 frames per second in the 1% lows. This puts it comparable to other boards tested, though at such a high frame rate, you’d never notice the difference between the best and worst performing boards.
In Shadow Of The Tomb Raider, again, we have performance that again sits slap bang in the middle of our chart at 253 FPS though the 1% lows sit a bit lower than the competition to the tune of around 6% when compared to the best result though this does only put it 2 FPS behind the Gigabyte Z890 AORUS Elite Wi-Fi 7.
Then in The Riftbreaker, as you probably guessed, the Taichi Lite sits in the middle again with a comparable result to the AORUS Elite Wi-Fi 7 board, which also puts it 8% faster than the MSI MEG Z890 ACE and with stronger 1% low figures as well, though in this case, the Maximus Hero from ASUS comes in with the best performance here.
Storage
When looking at SSD temperatures, it’s pretty easy to see the correlation between the slots, as slot 1 operates at Gen 5 speeds, and so you’d expect it to run hotter, coming in at 84 degrees, while slots 2, 3 and 4 are all covered by heatsinks and operate at Gen 4 speeds, and therefore come in identically at a respectable 52 degrees. Beyond that, slots 5 and 6 have no cooling of any kind and are therefore allowed to rise in temperatures to 72 and 78 degrees, respectively.
Boot Time
When it comes to boot time, the Taichi Lite is on the slower side, coming in at 45 seconds, but this is something I’ve come to expect from ASRock over the years, and is still comparable to boards from both Gigabyte and MSI and some BIOS settings can help to shave that time to a more acceptable level if you wanted, though we test using optimised defaults to give a level playing field.
Power Consumption
Power consumption wise, at idle, the Taichi Lite comes in as the most power efficient board that we’ve tested at just 85 Watts, whereas with a simulated Cinebench load, we see that rise to 351 Watts, which puts it into the mix, and sees it as the second best board we’ve tested in terms of power usage, while during Prime95, this rises even further, now at 381 Watts, making it one of the best.
