Today, we’ll be taking a quick look at the ASRock Z490 Steel Legend Motherboard, which utilizes Intel’s latest Z490 chipset, and is suitable for all Intel 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors, which is now on a newer LGA1200 socket.
Intel’s 10th Gen (Comet Lake) desktop processors made its debut on 30th April. The Core i9-10900K, which still uses 14nm technology, comes with Intel UHD Graphics 630 onboard, as well as 20MB of L3 cache. It has a massive TDP of 125W, and features 10 cores/20 threads running at a base frequency of 3.7GHz, with a Turbo Boost of up to 5.3GHz.
The Z490 Steel Legend motherboard comes with all of ASRock’s renowned features such as SuperAlloy, Dr.MOS,10 Phase Power Design, PCIE steel slots, 6 x SATA ports, 2 x Ultra M.2 slots for SSDs (with 2 full coverage M.2 heatsink). There’s also 2 x USB 3.2 Gen2 (Rear Type-A+C), 7 x USB 3.2 Gen1 (4Front, 2 Rear, 1 Front Type-C), 7.1 HD audio, and of course the Polychrome RGB, and well as Dragon 2.5 GB/s LAN.
This motherboard also supports memory speeds of up to DDR4-4266+ (OC), Intel Optane Memory, and AMD’s Quad CrossFireX support for multi-GPU configuration.
Take a look at Intel’s block diagram below of the Z490 chipset. You’ll notice that it offers up to 24 x PCIE 3.0 lanes, but no support for PCIE 4.0, which is a real disappointment. There’s no mention of support for XMP memory profiles, but most motherboards will allow you to run XMP in the BIOS. It also supports Wifi 6, 2.5G LAN, and of course Intel’s Optane memory.
To mitigate the lack of PCIE 4.0 support on Intel’s current 10th Gen (Comet Lake) processors, ASRock has included it’s own base clock generator to deliver PCIE 4.0 standards. However, this feature is reserved for future Intel processors (possibly 11th or 12th Gen) that has built-in PCIE 4.0 support.
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.
We’ve already tested the ASRock H470 Steel Legend and other ASRock Z490 motherboards over the past few weeks… so I’m expecting the performance to be very similar, with only the difference being, the design and looks of the motherboard. What I’m really interested in, is how well with this motherboard overclock. Can it reach 5.3GHz on all 10 cores?
Let’s continue and begin, by checking out the specifications and features of the ASRock Z490 Steel Legend Motherboard on our next page.
You can buy the ASRock Z490 Steel Legend Motherboard
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