Gadgetory

x3 99 what about x3 99 m and the M stands for micro ATX with the recent release of as rocks Tai Chi motherboard pretty much the fully featured tai chi but now cut off at the bottom to accommodate micro ATX builds now the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a motherboard like this is that John's very small micro ATX case the um x3 what I love to put this in that and make a build and I've just ordered that case right now so maybe stay tuned for that bill but today we're gonna focus on the Tai Chi and motherboard what it features and of course is it worth your money let's take a look welcome back to tech yes City this brand coming to you guys today with the Tai Chi M motherboard here the X 399 version and it's got the 1950s Red River CPU in it however this time around there was one big problem I ran into and that was with the previous h100 v1 cooler that I had the hose busted off in between moving some things so out of all the coolers I have around here and I do have a lot I could no longer get a cooler to fit the tr4 sockets so I had to improvise a little bit get a bit creative and I mounted the CPU cooler down with a monitor arm and it did work it did work pretty well however with that I didn't really want to overclock so today's tests will be on the stock 3.4 gigahertz which is already very impressive for 16 cores 32 threads and we're gonna take a look at the vrm temperatures now the vrm on the Tai Chi and motherboard features a 11 phase but with eight phases dedicated to the CPU itself and these are IR 3 5 5 v 60 amp dual stage MOSFETs so you got the high side and the low side integrated into one of these chips and you get eight of them dedicated towards your CPU also you've got 60 amp chokes and the best thing is you got tantalum pause cap capacitors these are pretty much the best in the biz so asrock have went full ball with this VRM and the results show in the past and I'll put the link in description below when I tested the x3 9i motherboards the asrock fatality board which reaches the same vrm had no problems at all getting a 4 gigahertz stable in less than ideal ambient temperatures so this here when I put the thermal imaging camera on it the vrm on the heatsink wise had got to around about 60 degrees and then on the actual MOSFETs itself was reading up to about 90 degrees this was in about 28 degrees ambient temperatures during the dead heat of summer so the temperatures on this vrm are really good for handling anything you throw at it especially on air or everyday water overclocks and now with this motherboard we did mention eleven phases and we've only mentioned eight dedicated towards the CPU the other three are dedicated towards the system on chip or otherwise known as the stock voltage this is important for getting your memory overclocks right with the course on Rison and thread ripper your memory overclock being important for your overall system speed especially if you're a gamer and so you've got three phases dedicated towards that and the memory itself now you notice probably with this motherboard there are a few little compromises in making it smaller that's the ddr4 Ram slots you'll notice that previously on the tire you had eight you've now got four but you actually have these same amount of phases I think you've got four phases dedicated towards the ddr4 memory on this so you'll accommodate up to 64 gigabytes of standard ddr4 storage but I believe with thread Ripper since it does support ECC memory you can actually have up to 256 gigabytes if you have the right memory chips and then to the right of those four dimm slots you've got the dr. debug LED readout this is important for diagnosing problems for instance if you've got like I did a pre-release bios version then you can read the codes and see if for instance you maybe need to only put one stick of memory and update the BIOS or try a different stick of memory up this debug LED will tell you that on the fly you've also got the power and reset button included although there are smaller buttons of course to accommodate this smaller motherboard though you do have three slots of nvme and got two storage available you can raid these within the bias itself so if you wish to make a raid 0 array on the already incredibly fast m2 you can with this motherboard now the heatsink as well I forgot to mention the heatsink that weighs in at 300 grams as well so if you want to put a fan on this thing for higher overclocks you can indeed do so I have heard of people getting these things 24.2 even 4.3 gigahertz on water since your 1950 X's are indeed in the top 5% of been rising chips on top of that your power delivery for this board you've got the standard 8 pin connector we've also got an additional 4 pin now the reason for this is of course for not just higher overclocks but in case some ATX power supplies only support the minimum 115 watts per 4 pins so essentially on your standard ATX power supply you could only have 230 watts of deliverance and now when I've overclocked these in the past the 1950 X it has gone over 230 watts but having an additional 115 Watts available just in case your power supply for instance doesn't have thick enough wires is always a great peace of mind to have moving further down the board you've got 2 USB 3 front out headers and also to us two front outs there's also an RGB header as well if you wish to control your RGB lighting from the motherboard itself and on that note of the RGB control you can control it from the bars or as rocks own software program which does update itself as well automatically which is a great touch the heatsink the Southbridge heatsink also has its own RGB lighting underneath that heatsink which again can be controlled via the motherboards bios or the software in Windows now going further through the important headers on this motherboard you've got five four pin pwm controlled fan headers as well this has enabled you to control your fan speeds in the BIOS itself and then you can save that to a profile I've been using this since 2014 on Azeroth boards does a phenomenal job never once come into a problem as opposed to some other motherboards in the past I have come into problems with the PWM control mainly in the fact that it was an annoyance this motherboard you set the profiles in you're gonna get no annoyances with fans dynamically changing at certain temperatures they just stick to that profile and they work really well now moving further along the bottom of the motherboard you've got the clear CMOS button which preferably I'd like to see move to the back of the motherboard is you do have to open up your case if you want to reset the BIOS in that regard great if you're an overclocking so I'd like to see that move to the back if possible but of course with the EM motherboard there is that excuse of the space limitations you've also got two front audio outs here one that's shaped or ninety degree angled and another that's just your straight fan header out sort of approach I don't know why they've included this maybe because people like cable management nowadays but they've got two of them there and that's connected to the purity sound for now when I've tested this sound and I always do audio tests when I look at motherboards the crosstalk was pretty good on this motherboard but it still does suffer from that same problem that I've diagnosed in practically every single motherboard that's come through here on the channel and that is passed a volume level of 90 it introduces some crosstalk in this case some bumping crosstalk on the right channel and you can see that in the testing software itself also on this motherboard specifically there was about five decibels higher crosstalk on the right channel than there was on the left though the results were still phenomenal if you're using a mid-range can for example you're gonna have a great time on this onboard audio I don't really see the need or reason to upgrade to a higher decamp combo unless of course you've got higher in headphones but on the note of the frequency response absolutely phenomenal extremely flat all the way from 10 Hertz up to 20 kilohertz if we look at the low range below 10 Hertz they're still only literally like a 2 or 3 decibel drop off this is some of the most impressive figures I've seen coming out of a motherboard to this date so a great job on the frequency response and going through the back of the motherboard you get 10 USB slots 8 of which are USB 3 one of which is USB 3.1 a and another which is USB type-c you also get dual band wireless appears - combination port and also a bias flash back button there's also support for optical out on your audio or 5.1 channel manual surround sound and last but not least you get dual one gigabit per second Intel NICs integrated into this motherboard of course the fatality series of these motherboards have that 10 gigabits per second solution if you need that so no you guys there it is with the x3 99m Taichi motherboard from my testing this thing is just as good as the x3 99 Tai Chi motherboard of course you get that shorter distance however making it a great solution for people who want to fit it in a micro ATX motherboard of course there are some compromises the ddr4 slots being the main one you do lose a 2-1 speed PCIe slots but you do still get three PCIe speed 16 slots and they are still reinforced to make them stronger although I've never had a problem with the normal pre steel solutions the sila ports itself you do get eight solder three ports and two you dot two slots to sew expandability and options are here on this motherboard especially for a micro ATX solution the x3 99 it does get the approval from me of course though with the x3 and I know other words they are quite expensive on average I do believe they are the most expensive motherboards out there at the moment at least to the high-end desktop consumer market I know guys hope you enjoyed this review if you did then be sure to hit that like and let me know in the comment section below what you think about this motherboard I love reading your thoughts and opinions as always and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon so stay tuned peace out for now bye I know that's a bit of a marketing term but you do get 316 speed slots on the Tai Chi M so you're one speed slots being something like a naturally aspirated engine four-speed turbocharged you're getting three supercharged turbo PCIe slots now looking at the rear of the motherboard you get h 9 10 9 now look at these it's coming through stop fighting me in okay ha don't really isn't it