The ASRock B560 Steel Legend motherboard arrived at our office recently, and we thought it would be a good idea if we did a quick unboxing, and a brief look at this motherboard. The ASRock B560 Steel Legend features Intel’s latest mainstream chipset, the B560 and is suitable for the latest Intel 11th Gen (Rocket Lake), as well as the previous 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors, both of which uses the LGA 1200 socket.
And as usual the B560, like all B-series chipsets comes with 12 PCIE lanes (vs 24 PCIE lanes on the higher-end Z590). It also support PCIE 4.0, 2.5GB LAN, Wifi 6 and higher memory speed of up to DDR4-3200. But what makes the B560 chipset so special, is that Intel have included options for memory overclocking, which was previously unavailable on its predecessor the B460 chipset. This means that, you’ll be able in boost your overall system performance by running higher speed memory (or overclocking your ram), even if CPU overclocking is limited.
The B560 Steel Legend, like all of ASRock’s other Steel Legend series of motherboards, come with plenty of unique features such as the High Density Glass Fabric PCB that comes in a Matte Black finish, SuperAlloy, Dr.MOS,10 Phase Power Design, PCIE steel slots, 6 x SATA ports, 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIE Gen4), and 2 x Ultra M.2 slots (PCIE Gen3) for SSDs.
For connectivity, you’ll find 1 x Front USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type-C (20 Gb/s), 1 x Rear USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C (10 Gb/s), 6 x USB 3.2 Gen1 (4 x Rear, 2 x Front), 7.1 HD Nahimic Audio, and of course the Polychrome RGB, and well as Dragon 2.5 GB/s LAN.
This motherboard can supports memory speeds of up to DDR4-4800+ (OC), Intel Optane Memory, but no mention of support for multi-GPU configuration.
Take a look at the block diagram of the B560 chipset below. You’ll notice that it offers up to 12 x PCIE 3.0 lanes, 1×16 + 1×4 PCIE 4.0 lanes for graphics or Intel SSD, and supports memory speeds of up to DDR4-3200 by default. There’s no mention of memory overclocking, but you know as well as I do, it’s all done in the BIOS. And finally, the B560 supports additional features such as Wifi 6, 2.5G LAN, and of course Intel’s Optane memory.
There’s one thing I just need to get off my chest … and it has to do with Intel’s Rocket Lake processors. It’s currently still on 14nm FinFET process, and has done so for the past 6 generations of Core processors spanning 5 years. Plus their so called flag-ship processor, the upcoming Core i9-11900K will now only 8-Cores/16-threads. That’s 2 cores less from its predecessor, the i9-10900K which originally had 10-cores.
What the **** is going on here?! Come on Intel get your act together. No wonder AMD are all over you … including me! Right, rant over. Let’s move on.
I would like to thank ASRock for providing the review sample. This is a snippet from what ASRock has to say about themselves on their website:
ASRock Inc. is established in 2002, specialized in the field of motherboards. ASRock strives to build up its own brand. With the 3C design concept, “Creativity, Consideration, Cost-effectiveness”, the company explores the limit of motherboards manufacturing while paying attention on the eco issue at the same time, developing products with the consideration of eco-friendly concept.
ASRock has been growing fast and become world third largest motherboard brand with headquarter in Taipei, Taiwan and branches in Europe and the USA. The young and vibrant company targets from mainstream to enthusiast MB segments for different kinds of users, owning reputation around the world market with its reliability and proficiency.
Unfortunately at the time of the review, we were unable to get our hands on Intel’s latest 11th Gen Rocket Lake processor. So in our tests, we’ll be using the 10th Gen Core i9-10900K (Comet Lake) processor, which is more than capable all except of course the lack PCIE 4.0 support.
Let’s dive straight in and start by checking out the specifications and features of the ASRock 560 Steel Legend Motherboard on our next page.
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