ASRock B550 Steel Legend review

Posted on: 08/31/2020 10:56 AM

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Happy with my current ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 motherboard. Ran a 3700x for a year, has been running 3950x for about a month w/Noctua D15S cooler.
Deliberately got the cheapest motherboard out there, as buying into an Asus Maximus Hero last time with a Haswell system couldn't even run stock settings without the processor overheating. Was so angry. Ended up having to delid the haswell, use liquid metal, and have a 100$ cooler on it... in the end, I flipped on the 'all core enhancement' and had a system that ran at 70C and couldn't overclock. Sheesh. What a colossal waste of cash, should have just gotten a cheapo motherboard and ran a non-k chip stock. After being sold on the promise of overclocking capability by intel, and not being able to, no more intel, and no more 300$ + motherboards.
Lesson learned!
Would definitely recommend this (unless you need HOTPLUG SATA, I can't find any options for it and it's not on by default).
8 sata ports, 2 NVME ports, intel gigabit NIC (if you're just using network for internet, it's plenty), an x16 slot, an x16 slot wired for x4, and open-ended slots. For the price I paid (154.99$ prior to 50$ Microcenter cpu + board combo discount), I have ZERO complaints. Works with 3000mhz micron (crucial ballistix) RAM out of the box.
Oh, well the mobo battery is dead a year into things, but whatever, those are pennies.
It's not worth buying a 250~300$ motherboard if you're not overclocking; and with Ryzen, it's often better to just leave it alone.
No LED's, No disco-tech in my PC, no fancy gimmicks. No spending 200$ on a fancy water cooler that should have just been spent on the processor in the first place, no more getting roasted out of the computer room. No, really, I swear it's several degrees cooler in here at any time compared to when I had the haswell system - yes, even with the 3950x.

Posted on: 08/31/2020 12:26 PM

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nice
would it also be possible to include all former boards tested to the graphs? if that's not possible because it's too much work, maybe keep a list of every series of product tested: so a list for b550 boards and so on, and maybe create a special database like the wikis use the {{template}} feature.

Hilbert made the most of the motherboards, he made it with the FLIR camera (which I don't have), so that won't be consistent. But nevertheless - I've made already another B550 mobo review (should be soon online) and another one is in progress. So you'll find the similar conditions for these ones.

Posted on: 08/31/2020 11:58 PM

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I value my money and sanity and is the reason I buy Asrock.