The AMD B550 Motherboard Overview: ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI, ASRock, and Others

ASRock B550 Steel Legend

The Steel Legend series of motherboards has been around for a couple of generations now, focusing more on an aesthetic more towards white and greys, as if the motherboards themselves were using stainless steel on the heatsinks. The B550 Steel Legend in this case uses heatsinks on the power delivery but they do not have a heatpipe at this price point, but we do get some extended M.2 armor from the chipset. The motherboard PCB looks very busy in this styling.

There is some RGB LEDs, on the rear panel cover and on the chipset, and there are two RGB headers on the board in the top right and bottom middle. The socket area has access to five 4-pin headers in easy reach, and like the B550 Taichi, we have four DDR4 slots with single sided latches.

On the right hand side of the board is a USB 3.0 header, a Type-C header, six SATA ports from the chipset, and a two-digit debug. On the bottom there are more fan headers, two USB 2.0 headers, and pads where power/reset buttons should be, perhaps on a different variant of this motherboard.

The B550 Steel Legend only has a single main PCIe 4.0 x16 slot from the CPU, with additional reinforcement, and there is an additional PCIe 3.0 x4 slot from the chipset. The audio for this board is beefed up, with the Realtek ALC1220 codec being paired with an NE5532 amp. The M.2 slots on this board are for one PCIe 4.0 x4 drive and one PCIe 3.0 x2 drive – there is an additional M.2 Wi-Fi slot in the middle.

From left to right, on the rear panel we get a DisplayPort, HDMI, a combination PS/2 port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports in blue, four USB 2.0 ports, a Type-A USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 port, a Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5 gigabit Ethernet port, spaces for the Wi-Fi antenna, and the audio jacks.