ASRock B550 Steel Legend; Updating The Design
ASRock Have Updated The Steel Legend Series With An ATX B550 Board
The ASRock B550 Steel Legend comes in mATX as well, but it is the ATX version up for review at the Guru of 3D. It offers a wide variety of features for Ryzen users including PCIe 4.0, while keeping the price below $200. As well, on paper at least, it can support up to 128 GB of DRAM, with maximum frequency of 4733MHz.
On the board, one of the M.2 slots and the topmost x16 PCIe slot are both PCIe 4.0, the other M.2 slot and remaining PCIe slots are all PCIe3.0. The onboard audio offers a AL1220 Nahimic codec with an NE5532 Premium Headset Amplifier as well to drive 600 Ohm headsets. Connectivity includes a 2.5-gigabit ethernet port powered by the Dragon RTL8125BG, but no Wifi unless you install one in an M.2 slot, in which case the two antennae ports on the back will come in handy.
The power design includes 14 power phases, a good quality 60A Power Choke, and Nichicon 12K Black Caps attached to a PCB with the 2oz copper inner layers found on high end boards. That might explain why the limits on overclocking that Guru3D encountered were from the Ryzen 7 3700X and cooling thereof, as opposed to the B550 Steel Legend. For those wanting a quiet system, the chipset on this board is passively cooled avoiding the noise produced by the active cooling present on many PCIe 4.0 boards.
Meet the ASRock B550 Steel Legend motherboard. This series from ASRock is meant to give users great stability, a boatload of features, and an attractive design, all while keeping the price quite low. This is a 30.5 x 24.4 cm ATX factor product (there’s also an mATX version available) equipped with a B550 chipset, and it offers such features as 14-phase power design, 2.5-gigabit ethernet at about 180 USD.
