Review on Motherboard ASRock B550M STEEL LEGEND by Kiril Penchev ᠌

Name: Motherboard ASRock B550M STEEL LEGEND
Item: Motherboard ASRock B550M STEEL LEGEND
Rating: 5

July 25, 2023

The best thing for the money, I'm glad I chose this option.

In general, I advise purchasing. The motherboard is highly respectable and cutting-edge in every manner, even if you are not an audiophile. Furthermore, if you're an audiophile, you probably already have a ton of different external ADCs and other audio equipment for digitizing.

Pros

An excellent motherboard in theory. The newest UEFI/BIOS version, 1.7, which was published just a few months prior to purchase, was already installed when the AMD Ryzen 7 5800x booted up. Care was taken in every step. Having a power supply with 8 pins and 4 pins is a nice reserve for expansion. indicates the maximum memory frequency is 4722 Mhz. Gold-plated contacts in PCI-E, DIMM, and audio connectors; reinforced PCI-E x16 connector for video cards; M2 with PCI-E gen.4x16 (for Vermeers and Matiss) - really a bomb; audiophile "golden" tips in the audio path and "black series" for digital; there is a digital audio output (this is important for me); six connectors for fans and water pumps (aside from CPU air cooling, everything else furthermore a variety of backlight connectors (I'm not sure why, but someone certainly needs these). It appears that the board is made of ceramic. includes heat-dissipating solid copper layers inside for shielding. I find it to be cool. A typical USB port has eight on the rear and eight additional inside connectors. One USB Type-C, but otherwise - like everyone else - of the delightful.

Cons

Although these are probably not flaws but rather features, just in case, be aware of: 1. When turned off, the motherboard's backlight remains on while all externally attached backlights go off. It will always shine for you in the dark if it is configured! Maybe there isn't enough nightlight in your home. So, that might be a bonus for someone:). All the backlight settings revert to default (and the backlight is on by default and is pretty unpleasant) if you shut down the computer by turning off the power supply key. 2. It is absurd to mix the cooling on an NVMe SSD with the heatsink on the chipset. First off, NVMe SSD drives either have their own heatsinks or have stickers that can't be removed on them right where the heatsink is mounted. The NVMe SSD's warranty will no longer be valid (stickers are located on all four sides of the drives). Second, there is a 2 mm space between the heatsink and the SSD and a 5 mm gap between the heatsink and the chipset (while there are Velcro-thermal pads, they are not pressed "in any way" despite being stuck without a gap). I measure the average SSD temperature at 46 degrees (perhaps, the video card is to blame for the SSD's heat). 3. Three sata ports on the motherboard will be disabled when the second M.2 is installed. Actually, this is a trait of Matisse and Renoir-inspired processors (I'm not sure about Vermeers), although it could come off as condescending. 4. I didn't need it because I had 64GB of RAM, however the memory bus frequency drops if all four DIMMs are installed. Everything can be "overclocked" back, and the motherboard generally has a wide overclocking margin, but keep that in mind. The chipset has this feature as well. 5. While looking for cells, the built-in sound card, for all its superb sounds, picks up pickups from a cell phone along the analog line. around -58 db, which is visible on the instruments but, of course, not audible to the human ear. I've observed that I occasionally digitize vinyl). It's irritating. My motherboard probably merely has poor grounding because it is in a brand-new case with excellent plastic coating and mounting stops-platforms. Everything may "leave" if the paint is torn off, but inconveniently.