Closer Look
The B850 Steel Legend arrived in a well-described retail package. The box is medium-sized compared to the average motherboard box size. It has two levels: a motherboard on the top and a small box with accessories. The lower level hides all the cables and manuals.
Inside the box is a motherboard, quick installation guide, SATA data cables, thermal sensor cable, WiFi antennas, an ASRock badge/sticker, and two cable stripes with the ASRock logo. It’s everything we may need for the installation and more.
The motherboard’s design is typical for the Steel Legend series. It’s a white and bright silver mix, which fits perfectly with white PC builds. Even though it’s a mid-shelf model, some elements are shared with the highest models, like the toolless PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSD installation. The EZ Release for the main PCIe slot has been changed to a more budget but still a handy option – Release Lite. It helps remove the graphics card due to a larger release switch and better access.
The motherboard has a main PCIe slot and one of the M.2 sockets in the 5.0 standard called Blazing. Although we wish for more M.2 PCIe 5.0 sockets, this is enough for most users, especially since we have three more PCIe 4.0 x4 sockets and possible RAID configurations. One of the M.2 PCIe 4.0 sockets has no heatsink.
The B850 Steel Legend has a 14+2+1 power phase design with 80A Dr.MOS phases for VCore, SOC, and MISC. It also uses high-end 20k capacitors, one of the main features of all higher ASRock motherboards. The power design is more than enough for all Ryzen AM5 processors. During the tests, we couldn’t hear any coil whine, which suggests the high quality of the design.
The B850 Steel Legend has many good features, like WiFi 7 or a newer audio codec. It wouldn’t be anything special, but most competitive motherboards are equipped with WiFi6/6E or no WiFi controller. Also, most use older audio codecs, while ASRock used Realtek ALC4082 with improved audio quality and additional features listed on this review’s previous page. We won’t find it in most B850 motherboards of other brands, and not even in all X870/X870E that cost much more.
Since I mentioned connectivity, desktop motherboards offer the fastest storage and networking. The B850 Steel Legend is equipped with the Dragon RTL8125BG NIC, a gaming-optimized Realtek chip, designed for up to 2500Mbps bandwidth.
The B850 Steel Legend supports all the popular DDR5 memory kits up to 8000MT/s. However, because of how the AMD Ryzen works, the optimal still seems to be 6400MT/s, and the best is dual-rank RAM. In our tests, we used Kingston Renegade RGB 96GB 6400MT/s CL32 kit, which seems the best around as it’s the fastest option at a 1:1 ratio, has a dual-rank design, and runs at tight timings out of the box. It has a programmed XMP profile, but ASRock motherboards handle it well, like EXPO profiles.
However, we couldn’t stabilize our memory kit at a 1:1 ratio and 6400MT/s. The motherboard required a 1:2 ratio, which is a little letdown since the previously reviewed B850M Riptide had no problems.
Above are some example photos of the test rig. As you can see, the B850 Steel Legend has an RGB backlight under the long M.2 heatsink on the bottom of the motherboard. The motherboard presents well and should look perfect on a white-theme PC.
Another great feature is ASRock’s BIOS/UEFI, which I will describe on the next page of this review.
