ASRock B650E Taichi Lite Motherboard Review

Aug 06, 2023

AMD motherboard partners have been trying to get users to upgrade to the new AM5 platform by offering revised options in the 600-series lineup. The A620 options exist for entry-level users but a user who wants something better has to look into the B650/B650E series which costs a whole lot more.

Considering this, ASRock decided to fine-tune its existing Taichi offerings with new LITE revisions that retain the same specs and I/O while cutting down the bling-bling & offering the boards at a lower price point. The result is today's ASRock B650E Taichi LITE motherboard which retails at a price point of $299.99 US or $69.99 US lower than the standard Taichi. The same board used to cost $400 US+ when we reviewed it back in November 2022. I stated in my review that this was a horrible price point so it's good to see not only that ASRock has revised the pricing of that board & also offers a new LITE variant with a more affordable price.

But is the new LITE series going to offer the same performance potential as its non-LITE brother? Well, that's what we are going to try to find out in this review.

But before we talk about the motherboard, let's take a small recap of the AM5 platform itself. The AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs will be migrating to a new home known as AM5, the successor to the long-lasting AM4 platform. It marks a fresh start for the Ryzen Desktop family and as such, existing Ryzen CPUs starting with Ryzen 1000 & all the way up to Ryzen 5000 won't be supported by the new platform we will tell you why it is so.

The AM5 platform will first and foremost feature the brand-new LGA 1718 socket. That's correct, AMD isn't going the PGA (Pin Grid Array) route anymore and now focusing on LGA (Land Grid Array), similar to what Intel uses on its existing desktop processors. The main reason to go LGA is due to the addition of enhanced and next-gen features such as PCIe Gen 5, DDR5, etc that we will get to see on the AM5 platform. The socket has a single latch & gone are the days of worrying about pins underneath your precious processors.

In terms of features, the AM5 platform will initially support AMD's Ryzen 7000 'Zen 4' Desktop CPUs and extend that support to future Ryzen CPUs and APUs. The platform offers DDR5-5200 (JEDEC) memory support, up to 28 PCIe lanes (Gen 5 standard), increased NVMe 4.0, and USB 3.2 I/O lanes & we have also heard chatter about native USB 4.0 support which will be a game-changer.

A new feature called EXPO (AMD Extended Profiles for Overclocking) will allow enhanced DDR5 memory OC on the new platform, similar to Intel's XMP. It has been a rough road for AM4 to offer decent DDR4 OC capabilities but that has more or less been sorted out by now, we can only expect DDR5 to have a much better OC and compatibility experience compared to DDR4 on AM4 platforms. Furthermore, it looks like the platform will only be DDR5 compatible and we won't see DDR4 options as we do on Intel's existing platform. But with DDR5 prices and availability improving, that won't be that big of a deal for most high-end consumers for who AMD will be aiming first.

AMD B650 Series Platform

The B650E & B650 chipsets are designed as a mainstream motherboard solution with the Extreme series featuring both PCIe Gen 5.0 & M.2 while the non-E boards will adopt only PCIe 5 slot designs. The B650 motherboards are the successor to the B550 motherboards and come in at a slightly higher price range. Compared to the X670/E offerings, the B650 chipset comes in a single PCH design. The motherboards carry support for RDNA 2 iGPU too which are Ryzen 7000 'Raphael' CPUs and offer both HDMI / DP outputs.

One of the highlighted features of the AMD AM5 600-series platform is SAS or Smart Access Storage. This technology will enable GPU decompression with supported Microsoft DirectStorage games. Although there aren't many of those out there yet but expect industry-wide support for this on newer platforms.

Traditional game loading takes a significant amount of compute power to decompress the game’s data, requiring the CPU to do the decompression and data transfer, which introduces latency and takes up considerable system resources.

To help bypass these bottlenecks, AMD has created SmartAccess Storage, a suite of technologies supporting Microsoft DirectStorage that utilizes Smart Access Memory with new AMD platform technologies along with Radeon GPU asset decompression to improve both game load times and texture streaming.

As mentioned earlier, AM4's reign is finally over and the AM5 socket is here now. The new socket moves from a PGA (Pin-Grid-Array) design to an LGA (Land-Grid-Array) layout. The new LGA 1718 socket offers more pin connections to the CPU, allowing for more communication channels with the board itself and enabling support for enhanced features that the new platform has to offer.

As for longevity, AMD hasn't promised anything but they have stated that they want to see the new AM5 socket last at least four to five years, similar to AM4. While there has been a lot of controversy regarding Ryzen support on the initial AM4 motherboards, I believe that AMD has learned and will not follow the same route as AM5. With that said, the AM4 platform will still continue forward & will be supported in the foreseeable future (possibly with newer hardware and software launches).

The AMD Ryzen 7000 Desktop CPUs feature a perfect square shape (45x45mm) but house a very chonky integrated heat spreader or IHS. The CPUs are the same length, width, and height as the existing Ryzen Desktop CPUs and are sealed across the sides so applying thermal paste won't fill the interior of the IHS with TIM. That's also why current coolers will be fully compatible with Ryzen 7000 chips.