The Intel B560 Motherboard Overview: 30+ Budget Models Starting from $75
by Gavin Bonshor on March 29, 2021 7:00 AM ESTASRock B560 Steel Legend
Starting our B560 overview in alphabetical order (by vendor), the first board we're taking a look at is ASRock's B560 Steel Legend. The Steel Legend is a common mainstay on its premium desktop chipsets as a mid-range model and currently sits atop its product range for B560. Visually, the ASRock B560 Steel Legend is using a black, grey, and white urban camouflage theme on the PCB, with silver and grey heatsinks. It includesRGB LEDs integrated into the chipset heatsink and along the right-hand side of the board which creates an underglow effect.
Located centrally on the board are two full-length PCIe slots, with the top slot operating at PCIe 4.0 x16 and the bottom slot electronically locked to PCIe 3.0 x4. ASRock also includes two PCIe 3.0 x4 slots for devices such as additional networking and audio controllers. For storage, the B560 Steel Legend includes three M.2 slots with the top slot operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 and the other two including support for both PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA drives. The third M.2 slot does share bandwidth with one of the board's six SATA ports, which as with Intel chipsets, includes support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays. ASRock also includes four memory slots with support for DDR4-4800 and a maximum capacity of 128 GB.
On the rear panel are one USB 3.2 G2 Type-C, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and two USB 2.0 ports, with an HDMI and DisplayPort video output pairing. For networking, there is a single Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5 GbE controller, while the board's five 3.5 mm audio jacks and S/PDIF optical output is driven by a Realtek ALC897 HD audio codec. Finishing off the rear panel is a PS/2 keyboard and mouse combination port.
ASRock has set an MSRP of $130 for the B560 Steel Legend, which is representative of its modest controller options,and the market position of B560. It is nice to see ASRock has included a 2.5 GbE port which is becoming normalized as we move past Gigabit networking.
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limitedaccess - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
Rocket Lake CPUs have 20 PCIe (4.0) lanes off the CPU. This a departure from previous generations in terms of lane count. Comet Lake (and older) for Intel have 16 lanes off the CPU.4 of those lanes are connected to the "first" m.2 slot of B560/Z590 motherboards. 10th gen CPUs don't have those lanes even as PCIe 3.0. Previous generation motherboards have all their m.2 slots using lanes connected to the chipset.
jrbales@outlook.com - Wednesday, March 31, 2021 - link
Thanks for the explanation. My AMD X570 has PCIE 4 lanes from both CPU and chipset, so this is my first build wheres I'm running up against this limitation. Now it all makes sense and fortunately, I did place my Samsung 970 EVO into the 2nd M.2 slot. Thanks again! And old dog CAN learn something new!ScottSoapbox - Tuesday, March 30, 2021 - link
There are three typos in the first paragraph that Word or a browser would catch if you took 10 seconds to check. Hint: words need spaces between them.Linustechtips12#6900xt - Thursday, April 8, 2021 - link
am I the only one who noticed the CMOS battery on the wifi thing in the asrock board?? lolutmode - Saturday, April 10, 2021 - link
has reaktek fixed speed dropping issue in their RTL8125B 2.5G NICmammuthus - Sunday, June 20, 2021 - link
Guys, witch one I should choose between ASUS ROG Strix B560-I Gaming WIFI and MSI MPG B560I Gaming Edge Wi-Fi?aigo - Thursday, July 29, 2021 - link
There is no sound through HDMI ports regardless of the OS; Linux, Windows. Definitely not a multimedia board, and neither it is for gaming.dwoodcock - Friday, August 13, 2021 - link
After messing about with this board all day trying to get RAID working I find out it doesn't support RAID at all!!!BadConfiguration - Thursday, October 28, 2021 - link
Hi Gavin, will the M.2_2 (marked ultra m2) use the pcie lanes from chipset ? Or would it use the pcie lanes from cpu ?