ASRock X670E Steel Legend review

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Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

The ASRock X670E Steel Legend is nothing revolutionary. It looks great (with silver accents), and there are three addressable and one regular LED strip header for RGB lovers. You get excellent access to six 4-pin headers for the fans (it would be even better to have eight, especially for more complex builds). The DDR5 slots support up to 128 GB of RAM and handle up to DDR5-6600+ memory. The ASRock X670E Steel Legend has one PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, one 3.0 x16, and one 3.0 x1. The audio for this board does well enough with the Realtek ALC1220 codec. The M.2 slots support one PCIe 5.0 x4 drive and three PCIe 4.0 x4 drives. The drawback is the lack of a radiator for the one just below the GPU. The price of the ASRock X670E Steel Legend is about 299-329 USD, which makes it rather expensive overall, but for an X670E motherboard, it's relatively reasonable. Also – you’ll find “only” four (but that shouldn’t be a problem with so many M.2 slots) SATA ports and eleven USB Type-A ports. You might want to know that this board has robust, 16+2+1 power delivery and no complaints in that department.

  

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DDR5 Memory

Memory compatibility should not and likely will not be an issue as long as you stick to recently released DIMMs and check the official QVL list

Power consumption

The AMD Ryzen 9 7900X is relatively modest in the power consumption department, usually consuming less than the Intel counter partner. It’s a 170 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce RTX 3080 installed / 32 GB memory / SSD, and the X670E motherboard, I hovered at roughly 70 Watts in IDLE. We reached over 330 Watts of power consumption when we stressed the processor. 

Performance & tweaking

There is not too much sense in manually tweaking the Ryzen 7000 CPUs. Also – there’s barely any OC headroom. An LCS (280mm+) is recommended to keep the used 7900X cool. If you want less struggle with the RAM settings, you better look for the RAM with the EXPO profiles (a more refined XMP profile aimed at the AMD processors). The temperatures of VRMs are suitable here, even with a high-end CPU.


 Guru3d-approved

  

Final words

The ASRock X670E Steel Legend is the mid-tier model from ASRock’s X670E family. It has an integrated I/O shield, great RGB implementation (with three aRGB connectors and one RGB compliant), PCIe 5.0 compatibility, PCIe 5.0 NVMe drives support (you can install one), and 4 SATA ports. There are no power/reset/clear CMOS buttons, which could come in handy when overclocking. You get a 2.5+1 Gbe Ethernet and Wi-Fi compatibility. The looks are excellent and should fit most of the builds. ASRock X670E Steel Legend has an excellent power delivery with 16+2+1 phase VRM. That should be enough even for the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and possibly the new processors for the AM5 socket. The power delivery section is cooled with a radiator; no fans are included (so overall, that’s good). There are six fan headers – so you shouldn’t be disappointed in that department, but some would like more (for example, eight). You won’t get Thunderbolt 4.0 ports, but on the other side, you’ll get many USB ports (11x Type-A) at the rear panel. Audio performance is more than decent, but we expect fresher than ALC1220. The price is rather steep, as the chipset itself is expensive. There are “only” 4 SATA ports, but the number of M.2 slots makes it a relatively minor drawback, especially since the 2.5” drives are not necessarily visibly cheaper (and they’re limited to 500 MB/s). We didn’t like that there is no radiator for the M.2 right below the GPU. It would be tough to cool the drive placed there. The ASRock X670E Steel Legend is a very solid (mainly due to the VRM) option, but nothing would stand out; it’s a typical mid-tier product. It’s a bit expensive (due to the used chipset), but we could find it for 299 USD, still - for the X670E motherboard, it's a relatively attractive price. Still, you shouldn’t be disappointed with the performance and the provided features; that’s why we’re granting an “Approved” award for this motherboard.

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