ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi Review

Name: ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi
Brand: ASRock
Price: 270 USD

ir_cow

on Dec 14th, 2022,

in Motherboards.

Manufacturer: ASRock

Board Software & Fan Control »

BIOS Overview

Clocks	Range	Interval
CPU Ratio:	.25–100.00	0.25
Infinity Fabric:	100–3000 MHz	N/A
Memory:	DDR5-300 – DDR5-16000	N/A
Voltages	Range	Interval
CPU Voltage:	0.005 V - 2.000 V	0.005 V
SoC Voltage:	0.700 - 2.800 V	0.005 V
DRAM Voltage:	0.800 V - 2.070 V	0.010 V
VDDIO_MEM Voltage:	0.800 V - 1.45 V	0.010 V
VDD_MISC Voltage:	0.500 V - 1.50 V	0.010 V

Taking a look at the ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi BIOS, first impressions are underwhelming and it stayed that way after poking around a bit more. For the novice users, currently missing is the "EZ Mode" page, meaning that you must dig into the BIOS to enable EXPO/XMP. This is actually not intuitive at all and is hidden to some degree. For those who are looking where the EXPO/XMP setting could be and have come across this review, its under the OC Tweaker tab > DRAM Profile Configuration > DRAM Profile Setting. Considering neither XMP or EXPO is mentioned in the description until the final step, it will be a bit of a challenge to navigate for a lot users. The next setting directly below the DRAM Profile is a DRAM Performance Mode option, which isn't great at explaining the purpose, or if it is worth changing the default settings. Changing this setting to "aggressive" will lower all the sub-timings, which does have a positive impact on performance. Unfortunately, this will probably not work for everyone because AMD DDR5 memory support is finicky. Consider it an experimental feature instead.

On the other end of the spectrum, those who are comfortable poking around, will have the ability to change load line calibration, enable PBO and do some voltage offsets for better CPU thermals while maintaining a overclock. Memory voltage also support goes up to 2.070 V, far beyond any possible use case. This actually brings up a real concern. ASRock really is hands off here, and you can easily pump a lot of voltage into the wrong things. There is no high voltage protection that needs to be overridden. On one hand, it is great ASRock allows the consumer to do whatever they please and this is often missed completely for other vendors motherboards, especially when it's not the Flagship or overclocking centric model. However, without an Easy Mode to fall back on, novice users are more likely to cause damage from even the most basic memory or CPU overclocks because they simply don't know better. It is best to avoid the BIOS and only enter to enable EXPO/EXP. This would be less of an issue, if the red text warning was at all helpful. Some settings get flagged as "high voltage," when in fact its within reason, while other values either don't have a red text warning at all, or the trigger is above what would be considered high enough to cause damage quickly, which defeats the purposes for a voltage warning. ASRock needs to look at ASUS and follow the White, Yellow, Purple, Red scheme, because it works so well.

Overall the ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi BIOS is quite disappointing. The ASRock X670E Taichi was given a pass because that was a launch review. ASRock has had plenty of time now to fix any bugs, add Easy-Mode and make the BIOS overall more user friendly.