ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara Motherboard Review: ASRock Rocks With White Marble

System Performance

Not all motherboards are created equal. On the face of it, they should all perform the same and differ only in the functionality they provide - however, this is not the case. The obvious pointers are power consumption, POST time and latency. This can come down to the manufacturing process and prowess, so these are tested.

For Z790 we are running using Windows 11 64-bit with the 22H2 update.

Power Consumption

In previous motherboard reviews, we focused on the overall system power, and while sometimes useful, it doesn't paint the full picture. Motherboards can vary in power, but users with more M.2 SSDs, more devices plugged into the motherboard, and additional PCIe devices such as capture cards or sound cards will experience variances in power consumption.

For our motherboard reviews going forward, we're going to be focusing on power draw explicitly from the CPU, as in real-world situations, the processor is the de-facto part of the system that will display variance in power; the graphics card will also draw power, but with so many different models of the graphics card, these values will vary massively. To capture CPU power draw from each motherboard tested, we will be using ElmorLabs PMD-USB power measurement device, which directly plugs into the 8-pin ATX EPS 12 V CPU power connectors, and lets us directly measure the power being fed into the CPU via the power delivery from the power supply.

Ideally, lower values are better, especially with Intel's 13th and 12th Gen Core processors. The other factor is, of course, performance, which goes hand in hand with power consumption depending on the workload and the amount of CPU processing being utilized on the cores. At idle, the lower value is best, but some motherboard vendors are more aggressive on voltages, and more voltage = more heat and higher power consumption.

At idle values, we are measuring the value while the system has settled down, and for load power, we're measuring the average peak value over the course of the 10-minute CB23 MT run. This is because while power-hungry at full-load, processors can sometimes spike for a second or two and as such, can skew peak results, hence why we take the average value.

Looking at CPU package power when used with our Intel Core i9-13900K, we can see at both idle and full-load, the ASRock Z790 Taichi Carrara pulls more watts than other LGA 1700 motherboards we've tested so far. At idle, we measured 5.5 W, which was just over a watt higher than other boards.

Looking at the full-load average, the Z790 Taichi Carrara was over 10 W higher on average than the next board on the list, the MSI Z790 Carbon WIFI. While not a massive different at full load, it looks as though ASRock is being more aggressive with CPU voltage and power at full-load.

Non-UEFI POST Time

Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this depends on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). We look at the POST Boot Time using a stopwatch as part of our testing. This is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows-specific features.)

Using our regular method to measure POST time, the Z790 Taichi Carrara took noticeably longer than other boards on test, which all bar the Taichi managed to boot in under 23 seconds. The Z790 Taichi Carrara, on the other hand, was over 8 seconds slower than the next slowest board, the GIGABYTE Z790 Aorus Xtreme.

DPC Latency

Deferred Procedure Call latency is a way in which Windows handles interrupt servicing. In order to wait for a processor to acknowledge the request, the system will queue all interrupt requests by priority. Critical interrupts will be handled as soon as possible, whereas lesser priority requests such as audio will be further down the line. If the audio device requires data, it will have to wait until the request is processed before the buffer is filled.

If the device drivers of higher priority components in a system are poorly implemented, this can cause delays in request scheduling and process time. This can lead to an empty audio buffer and characteristic audible pauses, pops, and clicks. The DPC latency checker measures how much time is taken processing DPCs from driver invocation. The lower the value will result in better audio transfer at smaller buffer sizes. Results are measured in microseconds.

We measure DPC latency out of the box with no tweaks or refinement within Windows, and as we can see, the Z790 Taichi Carrara did best out of the LGA 1700 models we've tested with the Core i9-13900K so far.