If you don't mind ditching overclocking support, then the B860 chipset can offer many of the benefits of Z890 motherboards without the extra cost. ASRock has nailed it in the value department without sacrificing important areas such as VRM and M.2 cooling, even managing to include Thunderbolt 4 support plus a white PCB and heatsinks. A solid board including these features for $200 is definitely a welcome change from all the overpriced motherboards we've seen lately.

The benefits go deeper. The board includes a Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 front panel port and ALC1220 audio. Unlike some of its AMD B850 equivalents we've looked at recently, it still offers the usual six SATA ports. Additionally, it can populate its PCIe Gen 5 slot and all its M.2 ports without any of them stealing lanes. Its upper M.2 heatsink is tool-free and offered exceptional cooling too, easily taming our PCIe Gen 5 SSD, which definitely can't be said of other boards, even some more expensive ones.

The layout is well-designed. It features 4-pin fan and RGB headers that are positioned for easy cable management. This ensures that cables are hidden and don't trail across the PCB. The layout provides enough connectivity to handle multiple fans or RGB components at both the top and bottom of the case. There's even a thermistor port and a thermistor probe is included, if you want to tie certain fan speeds to cool specific areas of your case more effectively or use a coolant probe. Thunderbolt 4 might be a little niche or high-end right now but there are plenty of uses for it from higher power delivery capability, display support or using Thunderbolt hubs or superfast SSDs.

There are a few niggles, though, such as a need for ASRock to update its EFI and software which have remained the same for as long as we can remember and are looking and feeling very dated compared to the competition. It's a shame there's no Wi-Fi 7 either and that the Wi-Fi module looks a little unsightly on the PCB, but this does at least mean upgrading it in future will be much easier than if it was embedded into the I/O panel. The upper M.2 heatsink was also tricky to install, but it was worth it thanks to excellent M.2 temperatures.

There are a couple of reasons you might want to spend a little more. One is for overclocking support, which isn't available on any B860 motherboard, it's an Intel chipset design limitation. Another is to include various tool-free features like for the PCIe x16 GPU slot. These features can make our lives as PC builders easier, but how often do you use them? There's no easy GPU release mechanism and there are much better implementations of M.2 tool-free features elsewhere and even on ASRock's own boards. In addition, if you're specifically looking for a white motherboard then there are options out there that really go to town and have white ports and slots too.

Overall, though, ASRock has done a great job in producing an affordable motherboard that currently sits at $200, but doesn't really have any glaring feature cuts that will leave you wanting either now or in a few years time. That issue will be far more common with the cheaper B860 motherboards. ASRock is giving you a decent number of USB ports with high speed options on both front and rear panels, and they didn't put old or outdated audio codecs on the board. Also, both the VRMs and majority of M.2 ports are cooled effectively with the ability to handle Intel's current Arrow Lake flagship as well as toasty PCIe Gen 5 SSDs. ASRock has produced some great value and well-balanced motherboards in the past and thankfully the B860 Steel Legend Wi-Fi is yet another excellent example of one.