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.
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PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Pretty much this. Modern games on DX12 won't see any benefit unless the game developer bakes in support (which they appear uninterested in doing for cost reasons) and older games run very well on a single modern GPU. AMD and NV are hardly acknowledging SLI these days either and nowhere but at the top end so there is even less compulsion for developers to bother with supporting it. All in all, you're better off not worrying about SLI unless the industry changes direction significantly in the next few years.ajlueke - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
The real question however, is does all this power delivery actually have any practical benefits? If I drop a 3000 series CPU in an X570 board vs X470, can I achieve any additional performance? And what is the power consumption differences in the respective chipsets? That is the type of info I would like to see.PeachNCream - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
It's a marketng differentiator only as motherboard manufacturers all use the same core components and are quick to emulate one another with similar features. Through branding and obscure features that do not significantly impact computer operation, they search for something they can offer that may encourage you to make a purchase in a very, very crowded field of offerings.lopri - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Solid power delivery for high-performance CPUs is perhaps the farthest thing from obscure marketing features. OEMs do play with marketing BS for differentiation, but the underlying power delivery system is extremely important and can impact everyday operation for these multi-core CPUs.PeachNCream - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
At long as it meets AMD specifications, no it won't. If it doesn't meet specifications, then it's a bad design. There's no reason to tout being mediocre or a hair or two above mediocre unless you're running out of unique bullet points for the backside of the box that nobody bothers to read anyway.Death666Angel - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
Stock performance will be the same across the board unless the manufacturer royally screwed up and the power delivery has to throttle due to temperatures (which there are some cases of with super cheap motherboards and 8 cores). Doing OC (and PBO is already OC) is where things start to change. More / better phases means less heat output and better voltages (ripple). This can potentially give you better clocks. But most of this is only useful when you start OCing on water or sub zero systems. Air cooled overclocking will hardly benefit at all. And regarding power consumption you can go into a lot of detail. Sometimes more power phases simply destroys efficiency, when they are all fired up all the time. Sometimes more power phases are smartly managed and load balanced to be kept at their optimal efficiency. It really depends on the implementation.Peter2k - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
If you leave everything at stock, then there is no real reason to upgradeMost people would think keeping the socket backwards compatible as an upside
In a desktop the only real reason why we think about power draw going up from 5w to 11w is because manufactures like to keep the cooling block small, and those need a fan
Chipset fans bring back memories out of terrible noisy days
Also I remember chipset coolers to be a bit bigger in the past, I'm sure if you're just trying to provide food cooling, without trying to hit that gamer look, then you can cool that chipset without active fan
If you want to try your hand at OC'ing you should probably want the better power delivery
And there is no telling if the older boards will also run fine with higher memory speeds
Guessing they would, at least until the magical 3600, that's not that outlandish high
And how much that affects performance this time around still has to be tested
Short story
You have a Ryzen already, just make it a drop in replacement
No need to throw out the board
Peter2k - Wednesday, July 10, 2019 - link
Any one that would argue about the electricity costs going up (I've encountered those) should also not that all that shiny bling probably draws more watts then the 6w or so difference between last gen and this genpavag - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
I expected benchmarks.sorten - Tuesday, July 9, 2019 - link
You expected benchmarks on 35+ boards that were released two days ago, and many of which aren't even available at retail?