ASRock Z390 Steel Legend Motherboard Overview
The ASRock Z390 Steel Legend motherboard keeps the same design that we saw on the B450 Steel Legend, so you have a black PCB with the winter digital camo and then you have silver on the heatsinks and I/O cover. Overall I think that the board looks quite good.
Starting at the CPU socket we of course have Intel’s LGA1151 socket. Z390 motherboards support both 8th generation and 9th generation Intel core processors. This board has an all digital power design which is made up of premium 60A power chokes and Nichicon 12K black caps.
Towards the top of the board you find your 8-pin EPS connector and a 4-pin CPU fan header.
Moving over to the side of the board we have the four DDR4 DIMM slots. These are not metal reinforced but support DDR4 memory all the way up to 4266+(OC). In front of the memory slots is your 24-pin ATX power connection and a USB 3.1 Gen 1 header. There is also a 4-pin RGB header right above the memory slots.
Coming down the board there are four SATA 6GB/s ports, these ports sort of sit at an indent in the board. This is made to make connecting your SATA cables much easier, especially if your cable routing holes are right by the end of the motherboard. The edge design of this motherboard is quite cool too with the edges being sort of cut off.
At the bottom of the board you’ll find the rest of your headers and connections. These include your HD audio headers, COM port header, 3-pin addressable RGB header, 4-pin RGB header, a USB 2.0 header, USB 3.1 gen 1 header, 2 4-pin fan headers, front panel headers, and two more SATA 6GB/s ports.
The bottom half of the board is characterized by a large heatsink that covers the Z390 PCH as well as the bottom M.2 slot. There is also a second M.2 heatsink on the top M.2 slot. Both of these slots are PCI-Express 3.0 x4. As far as expansion slots go you have two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots and three x1 slots. The top x16 slot has ASRock’s Steel Armor on it and the bottom slot is only x4 electrical. When it comes to audio ASRock is using the Realtek ALC1200 audio codec. Right above the top M.2 slot are two more 4-pin fan headers. So in total with the CPU fan header you have 5 headers. There is also a WiFi M.2 slot for an optional WiFi module.
ASRock has an interesting design on their I/O cover, as it covers some of your I/O, but it sort of cut off towards the bottom half. When it comes to rear I/O from left to right you have a combination PS/2 port, two USB 3.1 gen 1 ports, DisplayPort, HDMI, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports (1x type-A, 1x type-C), Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 2.0 ports, and HD audio.
