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.asp
Average 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.

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I just got 'saved' by a feature that I was unsure if I liked. On the back panel there is a button to clear the CMOS (changes made to the BIOS). I wasn't sure if I liked or not. Sure, it seems nice but the button isn't really protected so could be pressed by accident.

Of course, since I've never had a true UEFI BIOS, I was 'playing'. Oops! Of course I changed the wrong thing. The system would boot but I could not enter the BIOS at all. Also a UEFI utility in Windows would no longer run.

Sigh, Now I have to open the case change the position of a connection jumper on the motherboard to clear the CMOS... Wrong! Pressed the button on the back panel and was back to being able to enter the Bios. Yes, I had to set up my memory speed again but that is just a couple of clicks.

I think that I like the button. I WILL protect the thing though. I figure that a spacer and a ring of Velcro will avoid accidents. Even if I don't cover the thing the BIOS offers the option to save changes made as a configuration file. Hit the button by accident and just restore the configuration file.

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Check to see if you can save your BIOS settings as a profile, saves reentering everything after a press of the default button. You just have to load the profile and all your settings are put back.

In my last post I stated it as a configuration file but you have the proper term as 'profile'. Yes, it has the option and I will use.

LOL! I'm still having an issue getting used to having a mouse in the BIOS. I've never personally experienced a UEFI BIOS. My previous build was the closest being somewhat of a hybrid between an old style BIOS and UEFI. It has limited EFI functions but no 'U'.

It sort of blows me away that I can change +some+ UEFI BIOS settings from within Windows!

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It just doesn't seem "right", does it

I'm still in two minds about whether I like UEFI or not, which is probably moot because it looks like it's here to stay and will likely improve as time goes by...

One of the reasons I didn't expand on the reasons for my recent format was because the mouse became erratic in my UEFI BIOS and I didn't/don't know enough about UEFI to even begin to understand why, let alone explain how.

It was really odd though, if I was in Windows I'd have suspected a corrupt driver or the mouse tracking on the way out, but I wasn't, I was in the BIOS...

I also still don't understand how, and will probably never understand why, the Master Boot Tables of *ALL* my drives and partitions mysteriously changed from MBR to GPT as far as the UEFI BIOS was concerned... fortunately that was an easy fix found more by luck than educated guess.

Anyway, I'm off on one of my tangents so will close by saying I am running the latest UEFI BIOS available from Gigabytes and if it happens again i'll contact them... wouldn't be the first time I've had a motherboard manufacturer know of BIOS issues that they only release "fixes" for on a case by case basis that never make it into a release build... I'm not saying that's what's happened in my case but it has "that feel" to it... coupled with the mysterious slow folder specific issues on my SSD drive It's fair to say I'm not entirely filled with confidence about UEFI just yet... I haven't posted about that yet..