That's right, sports fans. That's right. This is the $300 AMD B550 board. Of course, the Asrock B550 Taichi is not the first expensive B550 motherboard to land in the PC Gamer lab. That honor goes to the Asus ROG Strix B550-E Gaming. However, as of this writing, ASRock's own X570 Taichi board stands out for being available for less. Oops.

As previously discussed, the B550 chipset is not much inferior in raw specs to AMD's top-of-the-line X570 chipset. The main difference concerns the interface between the CPU and the PCH chip at the center of the silicon; the B550 has four Gen 3 PCI Express lanes.

The X570's interface is also quad-lane, but via the Gen 4 PCI Express standard, so it has twice the bandwidth. The most direct and obvious impact is on storage: the B550 supports PCIe 4.0 directly to the CPU. That means 16 lanes for graphics and an additional 4 lanes to support M.2 drives. But while the X570 can handle a second PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD connected to the PCH thanks to the aforementioned interface, the B550's second M.2 socket is limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds. Ah, man.

Compared to the X570, there are other bandwidth-related limitations, such as USB. However, the B550 has up to two USB 3.1 G2 ports, something that was not possible with the previous B450 model. As a new chipset, the B550 supports both AMD's latest Ryzen 3000 CPUs and upcoming processors based on the Zen 3 architecture, which will be released later this year and will be branded Ryzen 4000. In other words, any B550 board is future-proof.

If this is the B550's broad proposition, and its relatively modest limitations are covered, then how about this board in particular? This board is built like the proverbial china building, specifically for bowel movements, as it is part of ASRock's premium Taichi series of products. This includes large metal plates on the topside, from the M.2 heatspreader to the VRM cooling. Some of these components are held in place with hex screws, and ASRock provides a handy screwdriver. And this adds to the sense of a board built to withstand a bomb blast.

There are additional metal bracing plates on the backside, making the motherboard very solid and rigid. There will be no problems with this motherboard buckling under heat buildup. On the electrical side, it is quite high quality: it has a 16-phase VRM, albeit with a duplexed Intersil ISL229004 8-phase controller, and the ALC1220 Realtek audio uses Nichicon gold caps and is well isolated from the rest of the board.

Otherwise, the board is basically loaded: unusually for a B550, there are eight SATA ports, four provided by the chipset and the other four by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller. As for graphics, there are three PCIe x16 slots. Strictly speaking, a 3-way AMD Crossfire is supported, but note that the third port is limited to 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes if you plan to implement three AMD GPUs.

Networking is also top notch with WiFi 6, Intel 2.5Gb Ethernet, and Bluetooth 5.1. Also included are configurable ASRock Polychrome RGB lighting, a two-digit debug display, physical power and reset switches, and an easily accessible CMOS clear button in case you overcook your overclocking settings.

When it comes to actual performance at stock clocks, the ASRock B550 Taichi puts up very impressive numbers. Despite its claimed support for up to DDR4-5200, we were unable to get more than 2,866 MHz clocked from DDR4 3200 HyperX Predator DIMMs, the same as other B550s we have recently tested. However, the Taichi was still faster at stock clocks than two of the other three B550 boards recently benchmarked, with the MSI Mortar coming out on top in this regard.

As for overclocking, it is a bit more complicated. In extreme cases, this product is probably the most overclockable B550 we have ever seen. However, ASRock's BIOS ties manual CPU core frequency settings to core voltage settings. As a result, when manually overclocking the CPU, the voltage must also be manually adjusted.

This makes overclocking routines very complex. There is also the possibility, albeit slight, that a novice overclocker could damage the CPU. Currently, Taichi records 4.2 GHz on all cores when manually adjusting voltages, the same as other B550 boards achieve with automatic voltages.

This means more overclocking effort with no payback.

Hardcore overclockers will of course appreciate this granularity, but we would at least like to see an option to overclock while allowing the board to decide how aggressively to power the CPU for the layman.

Aside from that, the ASRock Taichi B550 is a pretty good board overall. We are still a little uncomfortable with the idea of paying so much for a chipset that is only the second AMD chipset, and we would have liked to have seen the X550's price tag reduced to a fraction of the price of the X550's. For most users, however, the limitations of the B550 chipset compared to the X570 will be entirely unremarkable.