Review: ASRock B550 Steel Legend motherboard

That's one good looking MB right there.

Extremely satisfied with my current Asrock MB, my next one will clearly come from them.

 

Board looks good but would have loved to see OC potential on it. Memory and CPU tuning would be interesting.

 

i own the x570 steel legend, and its a very good looking board, and it performs very well, never had issues with my 3900x on it, i have 4 sticks running at 3733 16-17-17-16 and all sub timing tweaked

 

Same, I think the Steel Legend is one of the nicest mobos out there and the good thing is that they don't cost too much and they pack quite a bit!

 

Don't buy Asrock boards and graphics cards if you value your money and sanity (first hand experience)

 

Why are USB-C front I/O board headers less common? You'd think we'd see them more often by now...

 

signal integrity perhaps?

 

43°C min., 58°C avg. & especially 73°C max. for a 65W CPU?!

That doesn't sound good to me...

For comparison: my 3900x reached am VRM-max. @4.3GHz of 55°C, avg. 51°C @prime95 torture & 32°C idle on my B450M Mortar Max.

So don't get me wrong:

It may be a quite nice board (although WLAN is missing here) with nice features (e.g. ALC 1220) etc. an 12-16 core CPUs will run ok at stock/auto settings, but don't OC a 3900X(T) or 3950X unless you direkt some airflow to the VRM.

If you want to OC with an inexpensive board - better get a MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk - although it has 2 USBs less on the IO-Shield and only a ALC1200, but therefore it's 20 bucks cheaper.

 

Right now they are at MSI level, the bad quality of motherboard are from the past.
And by experience they are really good right now
For the main graphic card it's like Sapphire with cheaper cooler, it's good but for few more you can get Sapphire.
The top line of GPU is a real good card (the taichi as an exemple), i wait to see their evolution in that domain as they learn fast and have good price.

 

that's not what hardware unboxed ran into with their b550m steel legend which heatsinks' have slightly less surface area. max 57 °c with 3950x. coolest was msi b550m mortar with 50 °c. (measuring PCB backside)

 

I've made an edit to the article. The measurements were taken with thermal probes and also pyrometer with temps for the idle and stress scenario and put into the chart.

 

B450 steel was also a decent board. Rgb is a must on these.

 

EDIT - We've put the measurements taken with pyrometer and thermal probes connected to the Lamptron SM436 PCI Fan/RGB controller and the values (idle/load) are put in a chart and will continue using that for the next motherboards reviews.

nice
would it also be possible to include all former boards tested to the graphs? if that's not possible because it's too much work, maybe keep a list of every series of product tested: so a list for b550 boards and so on, and maybe create a special database like the wikis use the {{template}} feature.

 

I've been using ASRock boards since they were spun-off from Asus and I've had no issues with any of their boards.

 

Ya I got a 8350 with a AsRock 990FX Extreme9 running it at 4.8 since I got it with voltage at 1.52, had to because of voltage droop it had a 0.06 droop so needed 1.52 to keep stable but never a overheat issue it runs just fine. It's running my HTPC setup, also haven't had to up the voltage to keep stable over time so good VRM.. the only thing I didn't like was the LLC setup it's a little different on this 1 compared to usual ones hence the droop.

 

Happy with my current ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard. Ran a 3700x for a year, has been running 3950x for about a month w/Noctua D15S cooler.
Deliberately got the cheapest motherboard out there, as buying into an Asus Maximus Hero last time with a Haswell system couldn't even run stock settings without the processor overheating. Was so angry. Ended up having to delid the haswell, use liquid metal, and have a 100$ cooler on it... in the end, I flipped on the 'all core enhancement' and had a system that ran at 70C and couldn't overclock. Sheesh. What a colossal waste of cash, should have just gotten a cheapo motherboard and ran a non-k chip stock. After being sold on the promise of overclocking capability by intel, and not being able to, no more intel, and no more 300$ + motherboards.
Lesson learned!
Would definitely recommend this (unless you need HOTPLUG SATA, I can't find any options for it and it's not on by default).
8 sata ports, 2 NVME ports, intel gigabit NIC (if you're just using network for internet, it's plenty), an x16 slot, an x16 slot wired for x4, and open-ended slots. For the price I paid (154.99$ prior to 50$ Microcenter cpu + board combo discount), I have ZERO complaints. Works with 3000mhz micron (crucial ballistix) RAM out of the box.
Oh, well the mobo battery is dead a year into things, but whatever, those are pennies.
It's not worth buying a 250~300$ motherboard if you're not overclocking; and with Ryzen, it's often better to just leave it alone.
No LED's, No disco-tech in my PC, no fancy gimmicks. No spending 200$ on a fancy water cooler that should have just been spent on the processor in the first place, no more getting roasted out of the computer room. No, really, I swear it's several degrees cooler in here at any time compared to when I had the haswell system - yes, even with the 3950x.

 

Hilbert made the most of the motherboards, he made it with the FLIR camera (which I don't have), so that won't be consistent. But nevertheless - I've made already another B550 mobo review (should be soon online) and another one is in progress. So you'll find the similar conditions for these ones.

 

I value my money and sanity and is the reason I buy Asrock.