ASRock X670E Steel Legend review - Introduction

ASRock X670E Steel Legend review 
Would this legend be adamant as steel?

Meet the ASRock X670E Steel Legend motherboard. It’s a mid-tier motherboard (from a series that we had a chance to check with Z690 or B550 chipset) but with a high-end AM5 chipset. The “E” in the X670E indicates that the board needs to have at least one PCI5.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot. And what you’ll in the reviewed board? Here’s the listing:

• One M.2 PCIe Gen5 slot,
• Three M.2 PCIe Gen4 slots,
• One PCIe 5.0 x16,
• One PCIe 3.0 x16,
• One PCIe 3.0 x1

Although the higher-end M.2 SSDs generate quite a lot of heat – the Asrock X670E Steel Legend heatsinks are not the most extensive.

This is a 30.5 x 24.4 cm product, and that’s typical of the ATX form factor. It’s equipped with the X670E chipset, and it offers such features as a 16+2+1-phase power design, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, and a built-in Wi-Fi 6E module. ASRock X670E Steel Legend uses a silver-black design on an all-black PCB. There are camo accents visible. It does look good, we must admit. As for a feature that would make it stand out from the crowd of other X670E products (from other manufacturers), that would probably be quite many USB Type-A ports, as there are ten of them overall (and some people like a significant number of that certain feature).

 The ASRock X670E Steel Legend includes two full-length PCIe slots. The top slot support PCIe 5.0 x16; the second is PCIe 3.0 x16. One PCIe 3.0 x1 slot and a vertical M.2 Socket (Key E) supports a 2230 Wi-Fi/BT PCIe Wi-Fi module. This board has two Ethernet controllers: a 2.5 Gigabit Dragon RTL8125BG and a 1 Gigabit Realtek RTL8111.

The wireless connection has an 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6E Module and supports IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ax. It supports:

• Dual-Band 2x2 with extended 6GHz band support
• Two antennas to support 2 (Transmit) x 2 (Receive) diversity technology
• Bluetooth + High-speed class II
• MU-MIMO

There are four M.2 Sockets for your SSDs: one supports PCIe Gen5 x4, and three support PCIe Gen4 x4. You also get four SATA ports, which may not be a significant number, but it should be fine for the users when the M.2 drives are barely more expensive than the 2.5” drives. As for the audio, you get the Realtek® ALC1220 codec with Nahimic Audio. The power section is really good, as it’s a 16-phase design that should help handle even the most demanding CPUs, such as the Ryzen 9 7950X. Premium 60A Power Chokes (Nichicon12K - 100% Japan-made high-quality conductive polymer), the eight layers, and server-grade low-loss PCB should help ensure stability and reliability.  So what does X670E mean in reality? Four memory slots support up to 128 GB, a total of up to DDR5-6600+ (OC). There is some good information for RGB fans: one regular (12V) RGB LED header and three addressable (5V) RGB LED headers. Lighting can be synchronized using the ASRock Polychrome SYNCsoftware. There are no onboard power and reset buttons or a two-digit LED debugger. We’ll check this X670E motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X  and take it through our benchmark paces for this review. The board, as stated, is positioned in the higher-end market segment and looks attractive. The price that we could find is 299 USD, so it looks relatively attractive for an X670E-based motherboard. Let’s have a closer look at it, then, right?