ASRock H470 Steel Legend Motherboard Review

Verdict and Conclusion

All-in-all, the ASRock H470 Steel Legend is well designed motherboard that offers good performance and features. I do like Steel Legend’s camo/white/back/gray design as well as the large silver heatsinks. There are a few things, which I thought was limiting it’s potential, but that’s no fault of ASRock, but rather an Intel problem. The lack of support for PCIE 4.0 is one of them. Yes, it’s new and true, it’s not widely adopted yet. But if you compare the Intel 400-series to AMD X570 and B550 motherboards, the benefits you’ll get from a PCIE Gen4 SSD is just too hard to ignore.

Most motherboard manufacturers, including ASRock have now included a separate PCIE 4.0 clock chip on their Intel 400-series motherboards, which will provide future support for PCIE 4.0 when Intel release their future processors (possibly 11th or 12th Gen). And on this motherboard, there’s a M.2 connector reserved for PCIE Gen4 SSDs (see above) and the steel PCIE x16 slot is also ready to support future PCIE 4.0 graphics cards too.

One other thing I noticed with the H470 chipset, is that it doesn’t support XMP memory profiles, which I thought was strange. There was no option in the BIOS and the highest speed I can select is DDR4-2933, which according to Intel spec is the maximum.

And finally, something which quite unique to ASRock, and that’s Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology, which is found on selected ASRock’s 400 series motherboards. It allows users to install non-K series of Intel CPUs and enjoy the base frequency boost, giving you increased performance. Although I haven’t tested this with a non-K processor, but I’m sure it’s welcomed feature.

So now I’m armed with an Intel Core i9-10900K at default clock speed, along with DDR4 ram at maximum speed of 2933. We managed to get some really good scores including a Cinebench score of 2,597, and a PCMark 10 score of 7,927. For Port Royal, we got a score of 6,696 and a DLSS score of 45.32 fps. For 3DMark Timespy and Firestrike, we got scores of 11,443 and 24,484 respectively. All-in-all, I’m quite pleased with the results.

As far as features are concerned, the ASRock H470 Steel Legend has plenty including Nahimic HD audio, Super Alloy, 11 power phase design, DR.MOS and of course Polychrome Sync, as well as support for AMD CrossFireX.

And for connectivity, there’s 6 x SATA ports, 1 x PCIE 4.0 x16 steel slots, 1 x PCIE 3.0 x16 slot, 2 x PCIE 3.0 x1 slots, 1 x Hyper M.2 (PCIE Gen4) slot, 1 x Ultra M.2 slot, 1 x Hyper M.2 slots for SSDs. There’s also HDMI, Displayport, 2 x USB 3.2 Gen1 and 2 x Gen2 (both Type-A and Type-C), and the Dragon 2.5GB LAN.

You can buy the ASRock H470 Steel Legend motherboard for around USD $139.99 from Amazon – https://amzn.to/3aVcLWM. At this price, it’s quite attractive considering what you’re actually getting. It’s a good all-rounder, designed for the mainstream user who isn’t after overclocking.

Pros:

Supports all Intel 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors
Intel H470 chipset
Decent performance
Dragon 2.5GB LAN
Future support for PCIE 4.0
Polychrome Sync
Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology – Overclocking on Intel non-K processors

Cons:

Support memory upto DDR-2933 only
Currently does not fully support PCIE Gen4 SSDs

Final Words:

So in conclusion, the ASRock H470 Steel Legend is an attractively priced motherboard designed for the mainstream user. It offers good performance, great looks with a decent amount of features. The unique Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology allows non-K processors to be installed and increases performance, however serious overclockers may want to look elsewhere.

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