ASRock B560 Steel Legend Motherboard Review

Verdict and Conclusion

The B560 chipset has its strengths and its weaknesses. As a mainstream motherboard it has a lot going for it. It supports Intel’s latest 11th Gen Core (Rocket Lake) processors and it’s compatible with its predecessor, the 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors, which means it’s a good upgrade path if you already own a 10th Gen processor. What’s more, it now has native support for PCIE 4.0, plus Intel has now allowed the option for memory overclocking, which wasn’t available for the older B460 chipset.

That said, I really don’t understand why Intel is still using 14nm technology for their new 11th Gen processor. I mean the negativity surrounding 10th Gen (Comet Lake) was bad enough … so why do they do it? Running on 14nm means high TDP of these new processors, which in opinion is the real killer for them. Your guess is as good as mine … maybe Intel’s 12th Gen could be a game changer but you’ll have to wait until 2022/23. *Rant over*

So let’s summarize. The ASRock B560 Steel Legend is a decent mainstream motherboard that offers good performance with a decent amount of features. It’s unique silver, white, grey camo design makes the motherboard standout and it’s perfect for any system builder who’s after a white/black themed PC build.

The rich feature list includes a High Density Glass Fabric PCB that come is a Matte Black finish, SuperAlloy, Dr.MOS,10 Phase Power Design, PCIE 4.0 x16 Steel Slot, 6 x SATA ports, 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIE Gen4), and 2 x Ultra M.2 slots (PCIE Gen3) for SSDs. There’s also the usual 7.1 HD Nahimic Audio, and of course the Polychrome RGB, and well as Dragon 2.5 GB/s LAN.

During our benchmarks, we got some very good scores including a PCMark10 score  of 7,625, and a Passmark9 score of 8076. For Port Royal, we got a score of 6,791 with a DLSS score of 75.47 (using latest Nvidia drivers). For 3DMark Time Spy and Firestrike, we got an excellent score of 11,489 and 23,584 respectively. 

The overclocking ability of the B560 chipset is limited, but better than the older B460 chipset, which literally had none. In the end, we managed to overclock our Intel Core i9-10900K to 4.9GHz (default is 3.7GHz). Memory overclocking was good, with DDR4 memory speeds reaching up to DDR4-4000.

No word on the price of the ASRock B560 Steel Legend, but expect it to cost somewhere in the region of between USD $150-175. If the price is correct, then it’s a fair price for a mainstream motherboard that offers good performance with a decent amount of features.

Pros:

• Supports all Intel 11th Gen (Rocket Lake) and 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors
• Intel B560 chipset
• Good overall performance
• Good memory overclocking options
• Dragon 2.5GB/s LAN
• PCIE 4.0 Steel Slot
• 1 x Hyper M.2 slot (PCIE Gen4)
• 2 x Ultra M.2 slots (PCIE Gen3)

Cons:

• Only 12 PCIE 4.0 lanes

Final Words:

The ASRock B560 Steel Legend could easily earn the title of ‘King of the Mainstream Motherboards’. It’s packed with great features from ASRock with decent performance to match. And you get all this at a price that’s affordably attractive.