ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi

[ir_cow]

ASRock brings forward the popular Steel Legend motherboard for AMD's new AM5 platform while maximizing the B650E chipset effectiveness. Marketed towards gamers, the ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi offers the latest technologies with PCIe Gen 5, M.2 Gen 5, WiFi 6E and DDR5 support. Join me as we take a detailed look at this motherboard and unravel its secrets!

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[mechtech]

Well it’s good to see the long boot times have been addressed.

 

[Hofnaerrchen]

Thanks for the review. Now I can rule the board out as an option for a future upgrade.

 

[Chrispy_]

The B450 Steel Legend was a $90 board, just sayin'...

I'm looking at the feature set of B650 and it's all overkill for a lot of people. We need $100 A620 boards, and soon.

For the next few years at least, PCIe 4.0 is just fine - especially at the budget end of the spectrum - but let's not forget that the $1600 $2200 RTX 4090 and RX 7000-series are both PCIe 4.0 cards, and that a mere 7GB/s of storage bandwdith is still beyond the capabilities of current NAND and Controllers, outside of some extremely bursty, highly unrealistic synthetic tests. Those crazy 11GB/s numbers from PCIe 5.0 SSDs were only reads, not writes, and only on large sequential datasets doing dumb copies to RAM. If you need to decode or decompress that data, you're looking at 1GB/s on CPU, maybe 4GB/s if anything ever uses DirectStorage....

 

[ymdhis]

Seems dumb to only have 2 PCIe slots and 2 SATA ports, but I suppose if the board has integrated wifi and three gen4 4x4 m2 slots, then it is an acceptable trade. The problem is that this is the feature set I'd expect from a mATX board, and there are several other boards with similar features (integrated wifi, three m2 slots) which are cheaper.

still can't get over how stupid expensive AM5 boards are. Ever since PCIE 4.0, boards are getting more and more expensive.

The B450 Steel Legend was a $90 board, just sayin'...

And the b550m is $130. I have that, it's a pretty solid board, it was the most feature rich matx b550 board when I bought it.

 

[spnidel]

great value award
$270 board

what

 

[Gmr_Chick]

Before I'd gotten my B550 PG Velocita a long time ago, I'd never dealt with ASRock's BIOS before. And, board looks and features aside, I'm still wishing I'd remained oblivious to just how off-putting their BIOS are, lol. I rarely go into them just because everything is buried within sub-menus, the wording is confusing, text is hard for me to see, nothing is properly explained, there's no "EZ Mode"....I could go on and on, but I'll just end it by saying the BIOS on this ASRock board of mine is the biggest reason I want to get another ASUS board (I'll take the pain of Armoury Crate just to be able to have proper, user-friendly BIOS )

 

[mechtech]

The B450 Steel Legend was a $90 board, just sayin'...

I'm looking at the feature set of B650 and it's all overkill for a lot of people. We need $100 A620 boards, and soon.

For the next few years at least, PCIe 4.0 is just fine - especially at the budget end of the spectrum - but let's not forget that the $1600 $2200 RTX 4090 and RX 7000-series are both PCIe 4.0 cards, and that a mere 7GB/s of storage bandwdith is still beyond the capabilities of current NAND and Controllers, outside of some extremely bursty, highly unrealistic synthetic tests. Those crazy 11GB/s numbers from PCIe 5.0 SSDs were only reads, not writes, and only on large sequential datasets doing dumb copies to RAM. If you need to decode or decompress that data, you're looking at 1GB/s on CPU, maybe 4GB/s if anything ever uses DirectStorage....

yep got my new last gen stuff, ready to be wrapped and put under tree. Good for another 6-ish years.

 

[thegnome]

Great value given it's a PCIe 5.0 board, won't get much cheaper than that the coming time... It's a dissapointing trend seeing faster hardware getting more expensive, despite it always getting cheaper since the beginning...

 

[Chrispy_]

Seems dumb to only have 2 PCIe slots and 2 SATA ports, but I suppose if the board has integrated wifi and three gen4 4x4 m2 slots, then it is an acceptable trade. The problem is that this is the feature set I'd expect from a mATX board, and there are several other boards with similar features (integrated wifi, three m2 slots) which are cheaper.

still can't get over how stupid expensive AM5 boards are. Ever since PCIE 4.0, boards are getting more and more expensive.


And the b550m is $130. I have that, it's a pretty solid board, it was the most feature rich matx b550 board when I bought it.

Yeah, if $130 is the cost of a modern PCIe 4.0 board, then that's the price that A620 should be. I still don't know why people need PCIe 5.0 boards yet. The enthusiasts buying them are the same people who replace their hardware within 3 years or less. They'll be on their next board before anything meaningful that can use PCIe 5.0 comes to the consumer market.

 

[Redwoodz]

Maybe every board manufactorer should just copy Asus' bios. lmao. Learn to drain power from a board maybe?

 

[ymdhis]

I still don't know why people need PCIe 5.0 boards yet. The enthusiasts buying them are the same people who replace their hardware within 3 years or less. They'll be on their next board before anything meaningful that can use PCIe 5.0 comes to the consumer market.

It's for showing off your larger e-penis. Not much more.
Even the B550M I got was overkill, I wanted something that had PCIE 3.0 on the secondary slot, but in practice PCIE 2.0 probably would've been enough. But I may still get something that can make use of it down the years, because I don't intend to change it for quite a few years (unless they release an APU with a killer on-die gpu soon, and I can still sell the old machine for so much that I can get a new machine for a third of its price).

 

[SandyBridgeEnjoyer]

>$270
>great value award

I do not understand this, like why??? I get that there's extra I/O and PCIe Gen 5 support but like that's pretty much it, $70 more than a good enough mATX B650M Aorus Elite AX for just some I/O is not worth it imo, especially with PCIe Gen 5 devices being really uncommon or just not a thing at all

 

[ir_cow]

>$270
>great value award

I do not understand this, like why??? I get that there's extra I/O and PCIe Gen 5 support but like that's pretty much it, $70 more than a good enough mATX B650M Aorus Elite AX for just some I/O is not worth it imo, especially with PCIe Gen 5 devices being really uncommon or just not a thing at all

Read the conclusion of the review again.

Summary: If you wanted PCIe Gen5, this is about the cheapest it gets for AMD.

 

[The King]

The memory OC section under overclocking is very useful.

Any plans to test some of those 6 layer B650 MSi boards?

Would be interesting to see if they really do perform worse at Memory OC vs 8 layer PCBs.

 

[ir_cow]

Any plans to test some of those 6 layer B650 MSi boards?

Would be interesting to see if they really do perform worse at Memory OC vs 8 layer PCBs.

Send me one . On a serious note, I only test what is sent.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Maybe every board manufactorer should just copy Asus' bios. lmao. Learn to drain power from a board maybe?

Yeah, and install that malware armory crate by default.

That shit wrecked my entire OS once and i had to do a clean install as it couldn't be removed properly.

 

[Chrispy_]

Summary: If you wanted PCIe Gen5, this is about the cheapest it gets for AMD.

That's the sad truth, isn't it.

Intel's Gen5 boards are ~$100 cheaper because of Intel subsidy programs, right? It means you have to silently add $100 to the real cost of any AM5 CPU you buy which is really going to hurt the value proposition of the upcoming budget options, the non-X R5 7600 and R7 7700...

 

[pressing on]

That's the sad truth, isn't it.

Intel's Gen5 boards are ~$100 cheaper because of Intel subsidy programs, right? It means you have to silently add $100 to the real cost of any AM5 CPU you buy which is really going to hurt the value proposition of the upcoming budget options, the non-X R5 7600 and R7 7700...

Yes, around that amount

ASRock Intel B660M Steel Legend PCIe 5.0 DDR4
$150

ASRock AMD B650E STEEL LEGEND PCIe 5.0 DDR5
$270

but the B660M is a DDR4 board which currently still makes a difference, a big difference. And to add to it, Raptor Lake (RL) CPU support is readily available with a BIOS update plus the accompanying updated Intel ME firmware and a revised chipset driver. At this end of the market the most significant RL chips will be the 'budget' 6 Performance (P) core i5s launching in just over a couple of weeks. Correct they are based on the same die used for the 12600K so they are not true Raptors at all. And as non-K Intel chips they have a locked frequency. The 13400/F, 13500 and 13600 will all get a 200 MHz bump from their Alder Lake predecessors with more L2 and L3 cache. Courtesy of the 12600K die they will also acquire Efficient (E) cores of varying amounts, 4 for the 13400/F and 8 for the 13500, 13600. It might be worth saying that the 12600K is a 6 P + 4 E part.

The B660M Steel Legend may be a bit basic in some respects - the sound chip for example. Like most B660 boards power limits can easily be set to max and multi-core enhancement turned on. It is definitely a budget board even by B660 standards but is fine for the lower powered CPUs like the i5s. The combination of a board like this, at the price it is, with say the 13600 that is a 6 P + 8 E part turboing to 5.00 GHz is going to provide formidable opposition to the non-X 7600.

 

[chrcoluk]

That's the sad truth, isn't it.

Intel's Gen5 boards are ~$100 cheaper because of Intel subsidy programs, right? It means you have to silently add $100 to the real cost of any AM5 CPU you buy which is really going to hurt the value proposition of the upcoming budget options, the non-X R5 7600 and R7 7700...

Yeah I asked this question specifically on TPU thread why AMD boards currently have big price premium.

 

[ir_cow]

Yeah I asked this question specifically on TPU thread why AMD boards currently have big price premium.

It is the same answer as before. DDR5+PCIE 5 costs more. The cheapest Intel MB WITH DDR5 isn't a whole lot cheaper.

 

[chrcoluk]

It is the same answer as before. DDR5+PCIE 5 costs more. The cheapest Intel MB WITH DDR5 isn't a whole lot cheaper.

It does but I am not convinced its at the level of the price increases, the last reply in my thread I expect has some truth to it, where board vendors know AMD has demand, and they also know people dont need to buy a new board to stick in the next 3 gen chips, so they recover some of those losses by charging more for the board.

But if you have a cost statement showing proof they spending an extra $150-200 per board to add DDR5 support then I might rethink. A media rep statement doesnt cut it for me sorry. But yeah just my view, I think the truth is a mixture of both.

 

[Mussels]

It's weird that the missing features would barely bother me, but i'm still bothered by them

this feels like a budget mATX board, fluffed out to ATX size with high end ATX pricing

 

[the.lucius]

I've bought exactly that MB one month ago. So far I am very happy with it. It has everything I need (like 60A, PCI-E 5.0, WiFi+BT works good with my EXPO DDR5), and what it does not have, like many PCI-E slots or SATA slots - I have 1 GPU + 1 SATA SSD. Solid build, very good cooling for the M.2 SSDs, very stable so far. I use it with 7900X and Kingston Fury Beast 6000 Mhz EXPO. It is also one of the cheapest 650E boards I can find, needed WiFI + BT too. Overall, solid build, looks awesome and works the same so far. About the easy BIOS menu - I always hated it on Gigabyte Aorus MB, quite happy ASRock does not have it ))

 

[ir_cow]

About the easy BIOS menu - I always hated it on Gigabyte Aorus MB, quite happy ASRock does not have it ))

I understand some people may not use the mode, but it's nice to be able to set XMP, boot drive order, adjust fans, check computer info on one easy to read screen. Besides that, ASRock advanced menu isn't that user friendly either compared to MSI, Gigabyte or ASUS.