ASRock B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi review

White PC cases are very common these days but finding hardware to color-match with them can be tricky. Thankfully, there’s a growing number of motherboards and graphics cards to choose from when it comes to creating a clean, white PC and the ASRock B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi is one of the cheapest options out there for doing so if you’re building an AMD PC using a Ryzen 7000 or 9000-series CPU.

It doesn’t go quite as far with the white as Gigabyte and its Aorus Elite Ice motherboards, though, which have white ports and sockets for items such as memory modules and PCIe devices, However, the equivalent of the ASRock B850 chipset model we’re looking at today retails for noticeably more on Gigabyte’s side. The B850 chipset also brings with it the flexibility to drop certain features you might expect to see on a modern AMD motherboard.

For the ASRock B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi, that cut comes in the form of USB4, which is optional on this chipset, and has been dropped from a variety of similar boards too as it’s deemed unnecessary given its expense and niche appeal that likely don’t match up with what is essentially a low-end motherboard in the overall scheme of things.

Ultimately, it also depends on what else ASRock has decided to cut from the specs list as to whether the ASRock B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi is a decent option in its own right, aside from its color scheme.

For just over $230, it’s a great-looking motherboard, although, up close those white trimmings are more of a light silvery grey than pure white, but would still look better in a white PC case than a black motherboard. The 14+2+1 power phase design is cooled by two large heatsinks, with similar chunks of aluminium dealing with three of the four M.2 SSD ports too.

At mid-board is a single PCIe 5.0 M.2 port that’s equipped with a large tool-free heatsink, while the rest of the M.2 ports are all PCIe 4.0 and all can be used at the same time at full speed, with the only sacrifice being the second PCIe slot. Being able to run a PCIe 5.0 graphics card, SSD and three additional PCIe 4.0 SSDs at the same time is quite impressible for what is a low end motherboard, even if graphics cards won’t benefit for a few years in terms of actually offering higher frame rates.

Only of those ports lacks a heatsink and the lower ports use one single heatsink that will need tools to install.

Image 1 of 3

There are six fan headers to choose from, which is the bare minimum we’d expect on an ATX board to offer the flexibility to power multiple CPU cooler fans, pumps and several case fans without having to use splitter cables. There’s a generous four RGB headers too, made up of three 5V 3-pin and one 12V 4-pin. ASRock even managed to include some RGB lighting on the board itself under the long M.2 heatsink at the bottom.

As it’s ditched the expensive USB4 support, ASRock has managed to avert downgrading other features such as the audio or Wi-Fi, with Realtek ALC4080 included, while Wi-Fi 7 is the latest standard offered across both Intel and AMD platforms right now. The future-proofing continues with a USB 3.1 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps Type-C front panel header, which can power the latest external SSDs and shove data to them at over 2,000 MB/sec.

Image 1 of 2

What it lacks in fan headers it makes up for in Type-A USB ports on the rear I/O panel with nine in total, although only just over half of these are faster than USB 2.0. Still, there’s also two Type-C 10 Gbps ports here too plus you get a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port and a USB BIOS Flashback button too. Quick words on ASRock’s software and EFI, as there’s not much to write home about. They’re fairly basic and definitely not as fresh and snazzy as equivalent Asus alternatives, but still provide easy access to commonly used options.

PC Gamer test platform

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9900X | Cooler: Asus ROG Ryujin III 360 ARGB Extreme | RAM: 32 GB Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR5-6000 | Storage: 2 TB Corsair MP700 | PSU: MSI MAG AB50GL 850 W | OS: Windows 11 24H2 | Chassis: Open platform | Monitor: Dell U2415

Sadly there were no VRM or chipset temperature readouts to delve into and compare, but the result from our PCIe Gen 5 SSD was encouraging at a peak of just 71°C, so well away from the throttling dangerzone. There were certainly no warning signs with the CPU package power either, which were within single figures of the Asus ROG Strix B850-F Gaming WiFi and Gigabyte X870 Aorus Elite WiFi Ice, while the Cinebench scores were close too.

The Blender Junkshop result of 149 was just a single point behind the Gigabyte and two behind the Asus board, but in games things seem to have improved potentially thanks to software updates, with a higher Factorio score, average frame rate in Baldur’s Gate 3 and again in Cyberpunk 2077. This was all while consuming less power too.

If you want a motherboard for a white-themed PC and can’t stretch to Gigabyte’s Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice models, then the ASRock B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi is a worthy alternative that’s future-proofed for PCIe 5.0 graphics cards and M.2 SSDs and cooled the latter comfortably too. It has plenty of USB ports and even manages to offer USB 3.1 Gen 2x2 on the front panel.

However, it lacks USB4, which may become more useful in future, especially as it supports Thunderbolt 4 too, and while it has USB BIOS Flashback, it lacks most other similar features. While the Gigabyte B850 Aorus Elite Wi-Fi 7 Ice also lacks USB4, it offers more in the way of features, more expensive M.2 SSD cooling and tool-free features and goes all-out with a white color scheme too.