ASRock B450 Steel Legend Review
It’s been a while since I’ve last looked at a motherboard, so why not jump in with this one, something that, in theory, should be fairly future proof for the upcoming chips, the ASRock B450 Steel Legend.
The name is a bit much, but the board isn’t. It’s actually really impressive. Let’s start with the important stuff, RGB… I mean the VRMs. Yeah.. So it’s a 4 + 2 phase VRM setup with decent heatsinks over top. This 4+2 setup isn’t the beefiest in the world, but it also had no trouble running a 2700X at full boost clocks under stained 100% load, and performance on the BMW Blender render was on par with pretty much any other board. Temps wise the VRMs didn’t really break 60°c either, which is great.
So, it can handle any CPU you can currently fit in it. What about future ones? Well sadly ASRock couldn’t confirm this board will see a bios update to support the new 3000 series Ryzen chips, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be fine. The board probably isn’t recommended for the crazy 12 or 16 core options that are rumoured to be coming out, but should be plenty fine for all the mainstream options.
Right, enough about the CPU side, lets cover features. First, it’s got 4 DDR4 dimm slots, always a good start. It’s got 2 M.2 slots, the top one having an.. Alright heatsink, and the bottom being ran through the chipset so if you are using SATA ports 3 or 4 you can’t use that slot, and vice versa. You’ve got a reinforced PCIe x16 slot at the top, and quite a few X1 slots along with an x16 sized, but x4 electrically, slot that gets turned off if you use the top PCIe slot.
You, of course, have RGB, not only RGB on the board, but also an RGB header for the CPU cooler, and normal and addressable headers down the bottom. One header that is missing here is the newer USB C header, although that is pretty common to see gone on these cheaper boards.
Rear I/O is good. No WiFi, but gigabit ethernet, audio provided by a Realtek ALC892 chipset, USB 2, 3 and 3.1 ports along with Type C, and HDMI and DisplayPort should you be using an APU.
BIOS wise it’s nothing fancy. A pretty typical layout, easy enough to navigate, easy enough to OC on and a few tools for BIOS updates and fan curves built in which is always nice. It does offer a pretty decent amount of options when it comes to overclocking too.
So, rounding it up then, you’ve got a solid board that can handle any current gen Ryzen chip, OC nicely, has some good features, and to me is fairly nice looking, even with the RGB. So what’s the catch? Normally I’d say price, but this is right where you’d expect it at around £100, with the mATX version coming in at around £90. I really don’t have much to say beyond, if you are looking for a great board to get into Ryzen, or hopefully be ready for next gen, this is a brilliant choice I don’t think you’ll regret.
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