Final Thoughts
Typically when it comes to lower-tier chipsets (AMD B450, Intel B365) the motherboards are not that exciting. But when I first saw the ASRock B450 Steel Legend I was really impressed. This is one really good looking motherboard! The black PCB and urban winter camo design on the board really goes well together and the silver on the chipset heatsink and the M.2 heatsink look great too. You also get RGB lighting, which really ties the board together. Just by looking at this board you could easily mistake it for an X470 board.
Looks aside with the new Steel Legend boards ASRock has some great stability features like the use of 60A power chokes and Nichicon 12K black capacitors. You are also getting ASRock’s “Full Spike” ESD protection for the USB, Ethernet, and audio ports. With that we were able to give our Ryzen 7 2700X processor a 4.2 GHz overclock across all eight cores.
The big differences you are going to notice on a B450 board compared to X470 is that the B450 board is really designed for a single graphics card, will only have a single PCI-Express 3.0 x4 M.2 slot and less USB ports. But I really wouldn’t say you are missing all that much. Most people are only running a single graphics card, a single M.2 drive, and don’t need a boatload of extra USB ports. You match this board with a Ryzen 5 processor, 20-series GPU, NVMe SSD and you have the start to a really awesome system!
For those looking at building a Ryzen system the B450 Steel Legend is a solid choice and a great value at just over $100 at our favorite online retailer. Overall ThinkComputers gives the ASRock B450 Steel Legend a 9 out of 10 score!
Pros:
– Sleek design
– You can overclock on B450
– A-RGB lighting
– M.2 heatsink
– Price
Cons:
– BIOS does not have an easy mode
– A-Tuning software seems a bit dated
