ASRock B550 Taichi Razer Edition Review: Taichi, With a Splash of Chroma

Software

On the software side, ASRock includes a few utilities that cover overclocking and monitoring (A-Tuning), audio (Nahimic 3), software for updating drivers and downloading applications (App Shop), and of course, RGB control. Seeing this board supports Razer Chroma, you need to use the Razer Synapse 3 software for the best control over your environment.

Once installing this software, the RGBs started to blink randomly. ASRock provided a firmware update plus a new BIOS to resolve the issue. A company rep assured us that production boards won't have this issue. Aside from this, the software is comprehensive and worked without other problems.

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Firmware

We won’t cover UEFI/BIOS details as, for the most part, there aren’t any significant changes. We’ve captured a majority of the BIOS screens to share with you. ASRock includes an Easy Mode for high-level monitoring and adjustments, along with an Advanced section. The BIOS is organized well, with many of the more commonly used functions accessible without drilling down multiple levels to find them. In the end, the BIOS worked well and was easy to navigate and read. The main difference here between the original Taichi and this Razer Chroma is the color/theme inside the BIOS is different and more colorful -- it’s been Chroma-fied.

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Test System

As of late November 2020, we’ve updated our test system to Windows 10 64-bit OS (20H2) with all threat mitigations applied. We also upgraded our video card driver to 457.30 and reran all the game tests moving to the new 5000 series CPU. We use the latest non-beta motherboard BIOS available to the public unless otherwise noted. The hardware used is as follows:

Benchmark Settings

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