Performance – Part 1
All tests were performed on the ASRock B850 Steel Legend WiFi motherboard, AMD Ryzen 9 7950X processor, Colorful RTX4080 Advanced OC graphics card, 96GB Kingston Renegade RGB DDR5-6400 CL32 memory kit, and Predator GM7000 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 SSD. Additional M.2 storage tests were performed on Crucial 2TB T705 PCIe 5.0 x4 SSD. The Win11 x64 environment with the latest updates was used for the tests. Everything else will be mentioned during the tests.
Memory performance
The motherboard has no problem booting with memory up to DDR5-8000, precisely as specified. We can count on some more if we use a Ryzen 9000 series or 8000 series APU. However, with the CPU used, the DDR5-6400 seems like the best option as it uses the 1:1 IF ratio. However, it wasn’t possible to stabilize our setup at these settings, and we had to set a 1:2 ratio to pass all tests. It mainly affects memory latency, which is about 8-9ns higher.
Processor performance and mixed load tests
The rendering benchmark results are similar to those of the B850M Riptide motherboard or previously tested ASRock X870/X870E.
Above is the latest version of the Blender benchmark, and below are Cinebench 2024 results.
PCMark results are essential as they show how all components work with each other in a mixed-load environment. It can be translated into regular daily work, so what we all do and expect good results. The B850 Steel Legend performs well in all PCMark 10 tests. Below are our results in the Applications benchmark, which focuses on popular Microsoft applications.
Storage performance
The maximum bandwidth with the Crucial T705 2TB NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD was about 14028MB/s. It’s pretty good, but higher ASRock models perform slightly better, up to 14500MB/s. The result was repeatable.
The B850 chipset doesn’t support USB 4, but it’s equipped with USB 3.2 ports. However, the only 20Gbps port is on the front case panel. Since we use a bench table without USB ports, our results are limited to around 1GB/s on the 10Gbps USB 3.2 ports from the back of the motherboard.
On the next page, we continue performance tests and focus more on gaming and networking.
