A few days ago, we told you about the four XOC motherboards offered by ASUS, MSI, AORUS and above all ASRock, which is relaunching its OCF series, for ‘OC Formula’. We didn’t have much information on this ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF, but things have changed, as the product page is now available. There’s a certain amount of excitement about this card, because its features are very interesting, initial estimates of its price are around €535, and above all, it has a major advantage in the form of the Memory OC Shield.
The Memory OC Shield is the talk of the town, with manufacturers announcing support for DDR5 frequencies of up to 9600 MT/s and ASRock announcing 10133 MT/s. According to our colleagues at HKEPC, the ASRock team, with the help of in-house overclocker NickShih, have developed a special material to cover the memory line on the motherboard, considerably improving overclocking performance and memory stability. This shielding enables even processors with a poor IMC (memory controller) to reach higher frequencies than competing motherboards. A patent has been filed for this device.
The ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF card associated with an Intel Core Ultra 200 processor was able to reach a frequency of 10133 MT/s with timings of 46-30-30-74 2T, all with aircooling of course. Another advantage was that the tRCD, TRP, TrAS and TRFC timings could be tightened quite a bit.
Finally, there’s some good news: this motherboard also benefits from the connector for using the ElmorLabs OC Panel. Currently, only the Z790 APEX Encore and Z890 APEX motherboards are equipped with this. Suffice to say, we can’t wait to get our hands on a copy of this ASRock Z890 Taichi OCF.