ASRock Z390 Steel Legend review - Introduction

ASRock Z390 Steel legend review
More teel on that Z390 at 169 USD

In this review, we peek at a more mainstream Z390 motherboard from ASRock, meet the Z390 Steel Legend. Ready for 8th or 9th Gen processors this board is about performance, aesthetics, and features. The board looks great, a PCH cover. and black and grey style with some gear imagery really looks nice. The board’s covered with Aluminum Alloy Heatsinks enhance stability and according to ASRock, overclocking potential. Dual full coverage M.2 SSD heatsinks dissipate heat efficiently to ensure your high speed drives always work at their best. 

The Steel Legend series is similar to what ASUS is doing with TUF. ASRock has opted for extensive cooling of the motherboard with associated controllable LED lighting. The top pcie x16 slot is additionally protected with a steel bar. The motherboard comes with more expensive Nichicon 12K Black capacitors that in theory should last longer. There are two full m.2 expansion options on the PCB as well as six sata 6 Gb/s ports available. For the audio, a Realtek ALC1200 chip was chosen. The network is provided by a single Intel I219V. The Z390 Steel Legend from ASRock is a distinct motherboard. 

With the Coffee Lake-S refresh you can expect three processors predominantly become popular in demand for the PC gamer, as each and every one of the processors will offer fantastic gaming performance if your graphics card is fast enough. Intel is able to boost the Turbo frequencies towards that 5 GHz domain. And that is a big advantage that Intel has over AMD, which is wedges shut at that 4.2 GHz range with Ryzen 2000 (which is overall really good, but the high per clock core is where it matters in CPU bound gaming; e.g. with super high-end graphics cards like the RTX 2080 Ti). For this review, we'll use the eight-core / sixteen threads Core i9 9900K through our benchmark paces. You'll be able to tweak this proc towards at least 5.0 GHz on all eight cores with this motherboard. So yeah, have a peek and then let's head onwards into the review my man.