ASRock B450M Steel Legend Review
Conclusion
In closing what does one say about such a budget board? Admittedly before I used the B450M Steel Legend, I had the lowest of expectations if any at all. In my experience boards based on the more affordable chipsets tend to require plenty of sacrifice on the user’s side. I’m not saying that isn’t the case here, but how it makes up for that in other areas is to be lauded. Whatever may be missing, one can either buy a PCIe card for or use a USB dongle of sorts. Some sacrifices were always inevitable given its micro-ATX nature. That said, I must continue to opine about the unexpected performance and overclocking capability. In the world of AMD CPUs, DDR 3800 is KING and the B450M Steel Legend was more than capable of this.
I do have some concern over some multi-threaded results when overclocked but I’m confident those can be worked around if not tweaked out in the BIOS which offers a surprising number of options more options at this price point. The ASRock B450M Steel Legend has raised the bar in terms of what one should be expecting out of motherboard priced in this region. This may come to haunt ASRock later, but as it stands this one has set the bar for everything under $200 or R3,500~ locally.
You may not have all the fancy bells and whistles but there’s enough here to build a fully functional and perhaps even powerful gaming machine. Be it you pair the board with an APU or Ryzen CPU, you’re covered where it matters most. One simply doesn’t have the right award to give to this motherboard, but it is certainly the most impressive (bang for buck) I’ve come across in recent history. An excellent showing from ASRock and one well worth your consideration.
