ASRock B550 Steel Legend Review
|I reviewed ASRock’s B450 Steel Legend last year, and found it to be a solid board and a great option, so now that B550 is out, how does the new B550 Steel Legend compare? Pretty well. Let me walk you through its setup, some testing and more, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
Let me start with the important bit, the power delivery. This is a pretty beefy setup for a budget class board, sporting a 14 phase VRM setup, using SIC654 drivers rated for 60A each. That is, what you might call, overkill for Ryzen. At stock, the 3900X and 3950X draw around 140W under full load so this is more than fine. As you would expect then, even with a 3900X installed rendering in blender, it doesn’t really break a sweat. It got to between 45 and 50°c in a semi-ventilated, open sided case which is more than reasonable for VRMs.
One nice thing if you do want to try and make use of the overclocking headroom the VRMs give you, is that this is a board with an error code display down at the bottom right. That’s pretty rare to find on this class of board, and a welcome addition as the B450 version didn’t have one.
The rest of the board is pretty much as you would expect for a B550. You’ve got the top M.2 slot with a heatsink that connects directly to the CPU, as does the top reinforced PCIe slot, then everything else connects via the chipset and it’s PCIe Gen 3 x4 connection including the M.2 wifi slot, and the lower M.2 ssd slot.
As for rear I/O, you have a reasonable amount of USB ports, display outputs incase you want to use the 0 currently available Ryzen CPUs with integrated graphics – remember this board only supports Zen 2 architecture CPUs and above meaning even the 3200G and 3400G chips won’t officially work. You also have space for WiFi antennas should you want to add them later, and 2.5Gb ethernet that has become so common on B550 boards. And, as always, 7.1 audio powered by a Realtek ALC1220 codec.
You do also get the new USB 3.2 Gen 2 front panel connector here, right next to the standard usb 3 header and the 24 pin, and plenty of RGB lighting too, both from the rear I/O cover, and from the chipset too.
Inside the BIOS, it’s pretty basic. It’s got all the settings you would want, including advanced memory timings, and other overclocking options too, but that’s about it. It’s the fairly basic style too, no nice click-and-drag menus like the MSI boards, but it’s functional enough.
Now I have to bring you to the down side, which is the same for most of the B550 boards – the price. It’s a good £180, or around $200, making for a pretty premium board. It does back that up with impressive VRMs, and nice features like the post code display, but it’s what £50 more than the B450 version? That’s a little hard to justify, unless you really care about the upgrade path to Zen 3, or PCIe Gen 4 support. It’s a great board, but just like most B550s, maybe wait until it’s on sale.