ASRock B550 Steel Legend review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

The ASRock B550 Steel Legend certainly is an appealing-looking product. I was actually really impressed the first time I saw it. This is a really good-looking MoBo. For RGB lovers, there are some RGB LEDs on the rear panel cover and on the chipset, as well as two RGB (addressable and not) headers on the board in the top-right and bottom-centre part. There is nice access to overall seven 4-pin headers and, like on the B550 Taichi, there are four DDR4 slots with single-sided latches. The B550 Steel Legend has only a single main PCIe 4.0 x16 slot supported by the CPU (with additional reinforcement) and there is an extra PCIe 3.0 x4 slot supported by the chipset. The audio for this board is doing very well, you can find here a Realtek ALC1220 codec paired with a NE5532 amp. The M.2 slots on this board support one PCIe 4.0 x4 drive and one PCIe 3.0 x2 drive (there is an additional M.2 Wi-Fi slot in the middle as well). B550 is really an optimal chipset offer for the Ryzen range for most users. The price of the Asrock B550 Steel Legend is about 180 USD, which is a fair offer.


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DDR4 Memory

Memory compatibility should not, and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs. I'll keep repeating this, but there are some really good Ryzen-optimized kits out there. With Ryzen Generation 3 you can go higher in DDR4 clock frequency if you want to. We’d say that up to 3600 MHz CL16 is fine. If you go beyond this value, a 2:1 divider kicks in (but you can achieve even 3733 or 3800 MHz with a bit of effort and/or luck). This, in turn, may affect Infinity Fabric bandwidth and inter-core CCX bandwidth. We see no reason for faster DDR4 memory anyways. It's expensive and does not bring in added perf, as you can see in our Ryzen RAM gaming test. It’s better to have 4 banks occupied with double-sided memory.

Power consumption

With Ryzen 3000 processors now fabbed in 7nm, you may see some interesting energy efficiency. We used an 8-core 3700X with this B550, which is really adequate. The load values are excellent

Performance & tweaking

Your motherboard will not be a restriction for tweaking and overclocking. Processor and ASIC quality, alongside cooling, are the more important factors these days. The original Ryzen products from 2017 offered clocks in the 3900~4000 MHz range on all cores. Then, Ryzen 2000 / Zen+ brought it up a notch. Finally, Ryzen 3000 seems to handle an all-core clock of 4300~4400 MHz at best. Our Ryzen 7 3700X was able to reach a stable 4400 MHz, but that was done with proper liquid cooling, and it’s really the absolute maximum. If you tweak to the limit, likely 1.425V~1.450V is needed for a stable 4.3 GHz on all cores. The thing is, and I have been thinking about this for a long time, I would not recommend overclocking and tweaking at all. These processors can boost 1 or 2 cores to 4500 or 4600 (even 4.7 GHz for the 16-core model). So, while the rest of the cores will be binned slower, that's where you get your extra game performance. The positives of an all-core 4400 Mhz overclock would not outweigh the positives of the default high Turbo clocks. It is something to think about for sure. At the very least, you can try and see what works best for you. However, the binned clock recipe that AMD has applied to these processors by default will likely work best in most aspects, and this includes power consumption as well. This is going to be a generic and general consensus for all multi-core processors really. 


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Final words

With the B550 chipset, you get a single PCIe 4.0 for graphics, one M.2 slot, and overclocking ability.  This should be enough for the majority of consumers. Dare we say it?, X570 is not worth the price premium for this user base. We also need to emphasize that B450 motherboards were significantly cheaper but, on the other hand, most B550 products are priced okay, also in the VRM department a lot has changed and that shows on the B550 series. The Asrock B550 Steel Legend is no different, as it should handle even the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X. The price is about 180 USD, so quite a lot for a B-series chipset, but you get 2.5 GigE, 14-phase power stages, good audio performance, 6 SATA ports, reinforced PCIe slots, and all the essentials (and even more) are here. This is a good motherboard that’s not flashy (but you still get two regular and two addressable RGB headers). It’s worth buying.

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