Storage Interfaces

ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi Block Diagram

Storage Performance

The ASRock B650E Steel Legend WiFi is limited on high-speed USB ports compared to X670 (E) motherboards due to having one fewer chipset. There are still enough for many users that are just looking for any USB ports, regardless of the rated speed. These are good for headphones, USB Audio DACs, web cameras, game controllers, keyboards and mice. There are four 5 Gb/s USB Type-A ports, and two 10 Gbps Type-A / USB-C for those who need a little bit extra bandwidth. Internally there is a USB-C 20 Gbps header if that extra bandwidth is needed.

*ORICO USB4 NVMe Enclosure (ORICO-M208C3-U4) used for USB bandwidth tests.

AIDA64 (SATA 6 Gb/s)

AIDA64 (USB 3.2)

The external USB-C enclosure is rated for 40 Gb/s over USB4 or Thunderbolt 3/4. The fallback is 10 Gb/s for everything else. 1040 MB/s is right on target for a USB 3.2 Gen2 (10 Gbps) enclosure.

AIDA64 (NVMe M.2)

Using multiple PCIe Gen 4 x4 M.2 drives at once, testing shows that all M.2 sockets are at least Gen 4 x4. Without access to a Gen 5 NVMe, those M.2 slots cannot be fully tested. The M.2 Gen 5 sockets are always connected to the CPU directly, regardless of the motherboard in question, as the X670E/X670/B650 chipsets do not have the throughput available for Gen 5 devices.

ASRock has a total of three M.2 sockets, two of which are Gen 4 x4 and single Gen 5 x4. The main issue many will encounter with Gen 5 NVMe drives is thermal throttling. This has been brought up in previous reviews, though to reiterate here, the first generation of Gen 5 NVMe drives get extremely hot. If you're doing quick reads or writes it won't be a problem using the included heatsinks. However, if you plan on using the drives for sustained read and writes for a extended period of time, the first generation of Gen 5 SSDs will require active cooling, and the Blazing M.2 heatsink may not be enough without any airflow in the surrounding area.