The AMD X570 Motherboard Overview: Over 35+ Motherboards Analyzed
by Gavin Bonshor on July 9, 2019 8:00 AM ESTASRock X570 Steel Legend
Another mid-range board from ASRock is the X570 Steel Legend which blends a good range of features in with solid aesthetics with addressable RGB within its the power delivery and chipset heatsinks. The board sits on a black and urban camouflage themed PCB, with steel silver heatsinks, with elements of black to add contrast. This model is also very similar to the ASRock X570 Extreme4 in terms of components used, feature set, and overall design with the main difference coming via the color scheme.
In addition to the straight-lined heatsinks which makes the board look attractive, is a solid feature set including two full-length PCIe 4.0 slots which run at x16, and x16/x4 due to chipset constraints. This means up to two way AMD CrossFire multi-graphics card setups can be used. In the top right corner is four memory slots with support for up to DDR4-4666 which is very impressive, and these slots support up to a maximum of 64 GB. The storage capabilities of the ASRock X570 Steel Legend include two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots each with its own individual heatsink, and blends into the actively cooled X570 chipset heatsink quite nicely. Also featured is eight SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays, and ASRock's U.2 kit which is available separately is also supported.
The rear panel on the ASRock X570 Steel Legend is more comprehensive for a mid-range model than the ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4, with a single USB 3.1 G2 Type-C, one USB 3.1 G2 Type-A, and six USB 3.1 G1 Type-A ports. A single Ethernet port is powered by an Intel I211-AT Gigabit NIC, and while there is no wireless interface included, an M.2 Key E 2230 slot with inserts included on the IO shield allow for users to install their own. There are five 3.5 mm color coded audio jacks with a single S/PDIF optical output which are driven by a Realtek ALC1220 HD audio codec, a DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI video output for Ryzen 2nd and 3rd gen APUs, and finishing off the rear panel is a PS/2 combo port.
The ASRock X570 Steel Legend offers users a similar feature set to its X570 Phantom Gaming 4, but with better onboard audio (Realtek ALC1220 vs ALC1200) and utilizes addressable RGB effectively within the heatsinks. This model also uses a straight forward 10-phase power delivery and includes an 8-pin and 4-pin set of 12 V ATX CPU power inputs to provide power to the processor. Price wise, the ASRock X570 Steel Legend has an MSRP of $200, while users in the USA can also get a version with Wi-Fi 6 at a cost of $210.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
225 Comments
View All Comments
DigitalFreak - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Agreed. The major differences between pricing in motherboards nowadays is how well they support overclocking, how many / what type of Ethernet ports, and how much RGB garbage they throw on there. :-)brunis.dk - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Retarded Garbage Blinking!29a - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
RGB changes the price by pennies at the most.jrs77 - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
If it wasn't for the optical digital output I'd agree, but these seem to be rather rare and not common at all. A couple years back that wasn't the case, so I see an actual backwards trend here that comes with a lack of necessary ports. Atleast an optical digital output is necessary for me.lmcd - Friday, July 26, 2019 - link
I mean sure, but a decent number of them were completely useless from a terrible onboard chipset. Pretty sure one of my two desktops had one that maxed out at 2.0 channel over optical digital output.Silma - Thursday, July 11, 2019 - link
This would have been true, but for the dearth of ThunderBolt 3 ports, needed for audio interfaces for example.lso the price of most of the boards is outrageous compared to their real added value, imho.
umano - Friday, July 12, 2019 - link
I agree with Silma, for example the great asrock x299 itx at launch had a price tag of 399, with 4 memory channel and sodimm slot and 3 nvme. Something's wrong, or the amd statement is false (most modern i/o), or the mb manufacturers did not get the best from x570regsEx - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link
I like it either. But back in days, top Intel's Asrock P67 Fatali1y Professional was priced at $120. For that price you were getting 16+2 phase power, cooling with a pipe 3 brand new Etron USB 3.0 controllers (USB 3.2 Gen 1), additional PCIe controller, best at the time Realtek ALC892 sound, 2 Realtek RTL8111 LAN controllers, additional Marvell SATA controller, Dr. Debug display, power and reset buttons, 3.5" front USB 3 panel, additional rear USB 3 bracket and SLI bridge in the box. That was first generation of motherboards of XMP profiles and new graphical AMI UEFI (return of graphical AMI BIOS after 15 years) etc etc. Just $120. Now to get similar set you have to pay at least $360. And for $120 you can only get some poor office board. And ASRock was cheapest of high end boards back then. Now it's most expensive.regsEx - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link
"best at the time Realtek ALC892 sound"I mean best of Realtek. Obviously there were Creative X-Fi.
Marlin1975 - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
How soon before you can test the x570 boards? Really curious how pcie 3 m.2 cards perform in them with 2000 and 3000 series cpus. Does the new chipset help performance for 2000 cpus or even 3000 cpus compared to x470 and b450 boards?And any word on future mATX boards? Only 1 so far seems weird and also a monoply for asrock.