ASRock B450 Steel Legend Overview
Taking a first look at the B450 Steel Legend it has a design that is unlike any other ASRock motherboard. They have gone with a black PCB that has a sort of winter urban camouflage on it with silver accents. The heatsink on the VRM, M.2 slot, and chipset are silver as well. Overall this is a really good looking board.
Starting at the CPU socket we of course have AMD’s AM4 socket. This socket supports first and second generation Ryzen processors, but since this is a B450 chipset you will get the second generation features like XFR2 and Precision Boost Overdrive (if you install a second generation chip). This board features a 6-phase power design that makes use of 60A power chokes and Nichicon 12K black capacitors. Covering the power delivery components are two very large aluminum heatsinks.
Towards the top corner of the board is your 8-pin EPS connector.
Moving over to the memory slots, you have four DDR4 DIMM slots that support 64GB of memory. The speed of the memory all depends on the processor you decide to install, but you should be able to support at least 2667 MHz memory with both 1st generation and 2nd generation Ryzen chips installed. These slots are not metal-reinforced, but have closed locks on the bottom, which will make removing memory with a graphics card installed much easier. At the top corner of the board you have a 4-pin RGB header and two 4-pin fan headers (CPU fan & CPU optional). Moving down the board you’ll find your 24-pin ATX power connection and a USB 3.1 gen 1 internal header.
Continuing down the board you’ll find six SATA 6GB/s ports. Interestingly enough they are all in a row and not stacked like we normally see. Four of these ports are powered by the B450 chipset and support RAID 0, 1 and 10 modes. Two of these ports are powered by the ASMedia ASM1061 controller.
At the bottom of the board you are going to find the rest of your headers and connections. From left to right you have your HD audio header, TPM header, 4-pin RGB header, COM port header, two USB 2.0 headers, 3-pin addressable RGB header, reset CMOS header, two 4-pin fan headers, and your front panel headers.
As far as audio goes ASRock is using the Realtek ALC892 Audio Codec. You can see the Nichicon Fine Gold Series Audio Caps as well as the PCB isolated shielding for the audio section of the board.
When it comes to expansion slots you have two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and four PCI-Express 3.0 x1 slots. The top x16 slot features ASRock’s Steel Armor.
There are two M.2 slots on this board. The first sits above the top x16 slots and features an integrated heatsink. This is a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 slot which supports 80 mm M.2 solid state drives. The second M.2 slot is towards the bottom of the board and does not have a heatsink included. While it does support longer 110 mm M.2 drives it is only a PCI-Express 3.0 x2. It can also support SATA M.2 drives. Right beside the top M.2 slot is a 4-pin fan header, which is perfect for a rear exhaust fan. That makes 5 fan headers including the CPU fan headers.
The rear I/O of the board has a nice cover on that says “Steel Legend” on the top. As far as I/O ports go from left to right you have two USB 2.0 ports, a combination PS/2 port, DisplayPort, HDMI, four USB 3.1 gen 1, two USB 3.1 gen 2 (1x type-A, 1x type-C), Gigabit Ethernet, and audio connections. As a reminder this board features ASRock’s “Full Spike” ESD protection for the USB, Ethernet, and audio ports.
