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.

ASRock B550 Taichi ASRock B550M Steel Legend
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  • Kougar - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    Most of these boards are a serious VRM upgrade over the B450 boards. If I was buying Ryzen right now I'd easily go B550 over X570.

    So, only the ASUS boards offer bios flashback? Seems like a cheaper, just as userful version of dual BIOS anyway.
  • Brane2 - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    Finally ONE mini-ITX board with 3-monitor output.
  • Gigaplex - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    Colour me disappointed. I was hoping to do a mATX file server build using an APU. No support for existing APUs, no ETA on when consumers can buy the newer APUs, and most of these boards only have 4 SATA ports.

    I really don't want to have to buy a crappy NVIDIA 710 just to get it running.
  • mm0zct - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link

    If you're booting Linux, you might be able to get away with either a good old fashioned serial cable (a lot of boards still have a serial port header) or a USB-HDMI/VGA dongle, since these are supported by the mainline kernel. The main issue might jus tbe getting the BIOS to boot your install media, but a serial port might work still here.

    You could also just borrow a graphics card from any other system you own to do the initial install, and then let it run headlessly once it's up and running.
  • Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link

    I am booting Linux, and have tried completely headless in the past. It's not really worth the trouble (especially if I need to quickly diagnose issues), I'd rather just buy the crappy GPU.
  • IBM760XL - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    I'm probably missing something, but what's the point of including HDMI/DP/DVI outputs if the boards don't support APUs? Aren't you going to need to use the output on your dGPU anyway?

    I appreciate the summaries on the last page, but wish it could be enhanced a bit. E.g. what's the cheapest board with 2.5G Ethernet? What are the cheapest boards in general? I probably wouldn't go with the cheapest one, but given the prices on a lot of these, it's likely I would choose one of the less expensive ones.
  • Gigaplex - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link

    They will support the Zen 2 APUs, which aren't out yet.
  • IBM760XL - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    So checking my local store's inventory, they have 25 B550 boards in stock, of all varieties, but are completely sold out of both B450 and X570 (there are a few cheap A320 boards available as well, and nine TRX40 boards that start at $450).

    Something tells me Ryzen 3000 chips have been selling quicker than the motherboard manufacturers can keep up, and maybe that's part of the reason B550 prices are starting out high. If they're selling out, it makes sense for them to start with a higher MSRP, which they can always lower if demand falls.

    Unfortunately for AMD, if B450 doesn't come back in stock, that's going to hurt Ryzen 3000 sales. Intel mobo inventory is also a bit limited, but about half of the Intel models they offer are available, including some in that $75-$125 range, versus about 15% of the AMD models being in stock currently.
  • romrunning - Wednesday, June 17, 2020 - link

    I think the delays are all shipping-related. It's affecting all computer parts, like power supplies, motherboards, and the like. I wish a bunch of the mfgs would just pool resources to buy dedicated air cargo flights; maybe pooling will mitigate some of the losses on the lower margin items.
  • Oxford Guy - Tuesday, June 16, 2020 - link

    "Most of these boards are a serious VRM upgrade over the B450 boards. If I was buying Ryzen right now I'd easily go B550 over X570."

    Why does that matter? Overclocking died with Zen, especially Zen 2.

    As long as it doesn't throttle, you're good.

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