Review on ASRock B450 Steel Legend Motherboard with AMD Promontory B450 and DDR4 🔧 Support for Quad CrossFireX, SATA3 & USB3.1, M.2, A&GbE, and ATX Form Factor. by Lance Story

This is a great B450 board but there are a few important things I would like to emphasize to potential buyers: 1. I have received 2 of these boards so far (the first board was accidentally returned - more on that below ). ), and both boards arrived Ryzen 3000 ready, with stickers on the box advertising them as such. Both were able to post with my Ryzen 5 3600 without any problems. If you're careful to buy from Revain and not a third party, you're almost guaranteed to get a finished Ryzen 3000.2 sample. If you are using this board with an M.2 SSD, please note that there is a protective plastic piece on the thermal pad on the underside of the M.2 heatsink. I didn't notice this the first time I set up my build and only the second time because I flipped the heatsink when I installed the SSD.3. Make sure you update your BIOS immediately! The reason I refurbished my first board is that if my RAM ran at a frequency above 3000MHz (it's rated at 3400), my audio would crackle and crack. At first I assumed it was the faulty onboard audio and RMA. After setting up the second example, I went straight to Windows without overclocking the RAM (2133MHz by default) and didn't notice any audio issues. Went back into bios, overclocked, boom, sound problems are back. I did a little digging and found that the old BIOS that these boards ship with (around July 5th) is known to have audio issues when using XMP. After updating to the latest BIOS from ASRock website I now have no more audio issues when my RAM is running at 3200MHz (I couldn't post at 3400 in the old BIOS and haven't tried it in the new BIOS yet). Last of all, if you are interested in this board for its RGB capabilities, I would like to warn you that the LEDs on top of the chipset heatsink are very bright. They don't have a diffuser, so when your computer is below you (mine is on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf to my left), you're constantly visible in peripheral vision. However, ASRock's software allows you to configure each individual LED on both the chipset heatsink and the rear I/O cap and disable those top LEDs while keeping the bottom LEDs active. Personally, I prefer to disable RGB entirely, but I found it worth mentioning.