ASRock B550 Steel Legend review - Introduction

ASROCK B550 Steel Legend review 
The legendary B550 steal?

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 (Dragon RTL8125BG), and very sleek design. It’s priced at about 180 USD and checks all boxes to give you a stable and durable system.

 
On the motherboard, you can find an aluminium-alloy heatsink top cover that effectively improves heat dissipation. There’s dual M.2 Sockets for your SSD: a Hyper M.2 socket that supports PCIe Gen4 x4, and an M.2 socket that is capable of running PCIe Gen3 x2 and SATA3 mode. As for the audio, you’ll see an AL1220 Nahimic with a NE5532 Premium Headset Amplifier for the front panel audio connector (Supports up to 600 Ohm headsets) and a 120dB SNR DAC with a Differential Amplifier. The power section is very impressive for this segment of the market: a premium 60A Power Choke, with 14-phase power design, Nichicon 12K Black Caps (100% Japanese made, high-quality conductive-polymer capacitors) that should really help handle even the most demanding CPUs such as the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. The PCB has 2-ounce copper inner layers that provide stable signal traces and power shapes, thus delivering lower temperature and higher energy efficiency for overclocking. Of course, the colour scheme is mainly matte black with copper elements, to match the premium components. There is some good information for RGB fans here: two RGB LED headers and two addressable RGB LED headers. Devices can be synchronized across the range of Polychrome RGB Sync-certified accessories.

 
The reinforced steel slot comes with the next-generation PCI Express 4.0 standard. It has extra anchor points and a stronger latch. There’s also a very nice feature relating to the I/O Shield. It’s pre-mounted, but there’s some room for movement, which makes the I/O shield adjustable when you install it so that it fits your chassis perfectly without any mechanical issues. So what does B550 mean in reality? The B series are typically business (quick add-in) or consumer motherboards, but some say that the B stands for ‘budget’. Alongside the Ryzen 3 3000 series, there is the X570 chipset, and now also the B550 chipset for AM4 processors. The x16 slot and one M.2 slot still support PCIe Gen 4.0. This is provided by the processor, so you need a Ryzen 3000 to take advantage of this feature. Older procs will offer PCIe Gen 3.0, and the B550 chipset and DMI uplink otherwise are all PCIe Gen 3.0 as well. The board will offer you two reinforced x16 PCIe Gen 4.0 graphics slots. The motherboard has four RAM banks for up to 128 GB of DRAM, with max OC rated at 4733+ MHz. The board, as stated, is positioned in the middle of what is considered the mainstream segment, and it does look really good. Let’s have a closer look then, shall we?