Introduction

If you need a motherboard for Intel's Core Ultra processors and own a white PC then you have a few options at the moment and thanks to the recent introduction of Intel's B860 chipset, you now have a few more, if you don't mind ditching the ability to overclock that is. Even better is that the ASRock B860 Steel Legend Wi-Fi costs just $200, making it one of the cheapest boards we've looked at recently.



That does mean that ASRock has cut back in some areas, but it's done so carefully so as not to create large dents in its feature set. In fact, the board surprised us in a few areas in addition to managing to stand-out from the crowd thanks to its color scheme. With the latest Intel motherboards you're within your rights to expect PCIe Gen 5 support for your SSDs and potentially graphic card too, plus Wi-Fi 7 and USB4 or Thunderbolt 4 support.

As you dip down to this end of the budget scale, though, some of those are ditched to hit lower price points. The question here is whether ASRock put that money to good use elsewhere to create a motherboard that's also a good buy, rather than just a cheaper option. We still want a fully featured I/O panel with at least some high-speed USB options.

When it comes to PCIe Gen 5 support, we'd consider this optional at this price point, but if SSDs of that caliber are supported then we expect to at least see some kind of effort going into cool them properly. Speaking of cooling, the VRMs will be important too. You might not be overclocking, but there are cheaper options out there that you'd expect to fall over if dealing with a Core Ultra 9 285K for example. However, that's exactly the CPU this motherboard will be going up against in our testing, and we expect it to pass with flying colors.

Specifications