I posting this in advanced as no one would be likely to buy a motherboard unless they were building a system. On these forums such an endeavor cannot be considered anything but an advanced topic.
I suppose that I should post a link to the thing in case anyone wants to take a look.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Taichi/index.us.aspAverage cost is ~$189.99 with a $10.00 mail in rebate. This is by far the most I've ever spent on a motherboard but, so far, I consider it money well spent.
Let us now get the negatives out of the way... First the board would not work. Email tech support was quite good and they replaced the board. Of course I did not like having to return the thing but these things happen. To be honest I don't even know if the initial board was really bad as it turned out that I had a bad CPU. Anyway I shipped the board back on a Friday afternoon and had the replacement the following Friday.
Don't even start building the thing unless you have downloaded the latest UEFI BIOS flash file to a FAT32 formatted thumb drive. This is a new platform and updates seem frequent.
I have 4 8 GB sticks of 3200 MHz. memory that would only run at 1866 MHz.. This was expected and I will go deeper later.
Now for the good stuff!
Keep in mind that this platform is not for the everyday user that just wants to do emails and browse the Internet. It is a gaming board designed to allow easy over clocking. I don't over clock but have, in a way, done so with this board. The BIOS has a setting to over clock automatically which I have enabled. Under normal operation this does nothing but the board will automatically change things if more speed is needed. Think of this as an 'on-the-fly' turbo mode.
If you enable in the BIOS the board 'learns' how your system boots and gets faster and faster as to boot times. When I first had the system up and running I was booting to log in from totally off in ~25 seconds. After enabling this BIOS feature my cold boot time dropped to ~17 seconds after only two cold boots.
Sigh... I have a total of 32 GB of 3200 MHz. memory that only ran at 1866 MHz.. This is a failsafe feature to make it more sure that the system can get up and running. The platform is new enough that they publish a list of memory models that will work. I did my homework before I bought and expected this. It took a total of three mouse clicks in the BIOS to have my memory running at 3200 MHz..
Ya want SATA ports? The thing has 10 all nicely arranged in a bank of two rows of 5 along the edge of the board. This is really nice but attach the cables before mounting the board in the case as the ports are difficult unless you have a REALLY large case.
This thing is sweet! You want to use liquid CPU cooling? It has a header designed for the pump's power. If you want to air cool with a tube cooler it has 2 CPU fan power connections so you can increase the air flow... You can 'stack' fans.
I guess the bottom line is if I would recommend the thing. Without reservation I would do so but only fore those that want a REALLY strong system. This motherboard is a dream come true for a gamer but not for a casual user.