ASRock B660 Steel Legend or the cheapest motherboard in tests

ASRock B660 Steel Legend in detail

The low price of a motherboard brings with it a few unconventional limitations. Ones that are not often found in competing models for similar money. Some of these are of the safety variety to avoid unnecessary damage to critical components. For a customer buying a standard, reasonably set-up build in this price class, they won’t be a bother, and saving money with the B660 Steel Legend can be beneficial.

Pricing is even below the Asus TUF Gaming B660 Plus WiFi D4, which is the cheapest motherboard on the LGA 1700 platform we’ve tested so far. We also awarded it the “Smart Buy!” award and in a way it is the benchmark for the ASRock B660 Steel Legend. However, these are boards that are different in many ways. In short, ASRock is aiming at a slightly different target group.

ASRock B660 Steel Legend

The board is based on the Intel B660 chipset and supports DDR4 memory. At the same time, it is a cheap enough design that you will probably consider it when building a mid-range computer, or at the very least, it will make it into the wider selection.

The B660 Steel Legend’s format is ATX. The PCB geometry with dimensions of 305 × 244 mm differs from the conventional ones only by sharper corners. These are practically cut at a 45-degree angle instead of the typical rounding.

Otherwise, the shape of the PCB does not deviate from the usual, and a full number of mounting holes are also present, which ASRock tends to reduce differently from the right side for various visual elements (think, for example, of the B365 Phantom Gaming 4). These are not missing here either, but ASRock has managed to keep the standard layout. That is, except for the 24-pin connector, which is dipped inside more prominently. This is in order to fit the illuminated “Steel Legend” sign next to it.

The position of the DIMM slots is not affected by the above, and the distance between the contacts of the first and the center of the CPU socket is the traditional 56 mm. This means that memory support with CPU coolers is maintained as well as on other boards. Only the voltage regulators, capacitors and the coil of the RAM power delivery are in a smaller gap (between the last spot and the ATX connector) than it usually is.

In the axis of the ATX connector, i.e. at a greater distance from the edge of the PCB, there are also internal USB connectors (3.2. gen2 × 2 and 3.2 gen. 1) and 3-pin connectors for connecting ARGB LED peripherals. On this right side, the motherboard also has its own lighting. There are seven RGB LEDs next to the DIMM slots, and then below that, there are four next to the SATA connectors. They are placed on the back of the PCB so that they don’t shine directly, but so that the light is dimly reflected from the PC case sheet metal. The lighting effect is thus, evenly dispersed around the outline of the motherboard.

Since this is a cheaper board where various savings are possible, we measured the PCB thickness. This is no different from more expensive (and pricey) motherboards with 1.6 mm.

However, ASRock no longer denies saving on SSD heatsinks. There is only one, on the first M.2 slot. The board would be naturally better off with a second one (as the TUF B660 Plus WiFi D4 has, for example), on the third slot, which is also high-speed with four PCI Express lanes connected.

One more fact is worth commenting on the first M.2 slot or the SSD mounting. If you don’t use the heatsink supplied with the motherboard because the SSD has its own, the spacers need to be replaced for stable mounting. The pre-installed one has a tapered neck and counts with the thickness of the supplied heatsink. Without it, the SSD will have some play on one side. But the solution to this situation is quite simple – the post is just screwed on and you just need to swap it with one from another, free position.

Worse is when you use all the slots. For such cases, it would therefore be convenient if ASRock would supply an extra standard post as part of the accessories. After all, there are quite a few SSDs that have their own heatsink and specially among those with PCIe 4.0 support.

Some more important information about PCI Express. The first PCIe ×16 slot supports the 5.0 standard. The second is already PCIe 4.0 and only four-lane. The remaining two PCI Express slots are single-lane with support for the 3.0 standard.

Exceedingly slow is one of the three M2 slots here. For SSD. The middle one is only connected by two PCIe lanes and only supports the 3.0 standard. However, it is worth praising at least the placement of this slowest M.2 slot under the first PCIe ×16 slot.
As you know from our tests, SSD cooling can be worse here due to the more intense heating of the air by the graphics card, but combined with the lower performance (and therefore power draw and temperatures) of the SSD, the occurrence of critical scenarios is minimized. In other words, an SSD controller bottlenecked by two PCI Express interface lanes is unlikely to just climb to very high temperatures even in harsh environments. By the way, this M.2 slot is the only one that also supports SATA SSDs.

The board has plenty of SATA SSD connection options, even within the inch storage. This via up to six connectors, none of which share lanes with PCI Express connectors. This means that you can eventually use all connectors (M.2 and SATA) at the same time. The two SATA connectors, meanwhile, are connected from the ASMedia ASM1061 external controller.

There is also a fourth M.2 slot on the board, but this one is already with a key type E, i.e. for connecting the RF module WiFi and Bluetooth. It’s just a pity that the back panel of the board has no SMA connectors for external antennas and does not even count on their mounting. ASRock hasn’t reserved a position for them on the rear panel, although they would fit comfortably alongside this port equipment. Some of the connectors (HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4a, USB-C) as well as the BIOS flashback button are inefficiently distributed in only one row. It would have been enough to put the DP connector above the HDMI connector, as is commonly done, and space for antenna connectors would have been found.

However, this is probably a deliberate saving and the reactive space between the external I/O ports was created on purpose. Compared to the TUF Gaming B660 Plus WiFi D4, however, the B660 Steel Legend pulls the short end of the stick in this one. There could perhaps have been more USB ports as well. Of the ones that are, though, most are of the 3.2 gen. 1 (4) standard. The USB Type-C connector is 10-gigabit (3.2 gen. 2), and there are also two USB 2.0 ports typically for connecting peripherals (keyboard and mouse) that don’t need higher transfer speeds. There’s also a PS/2 connector on the rear panel and, unlike the Biostar B660GTA, there are audio connectors in the full lineup, including an S/PDIF optical output. The audio adapter is weaker though, the Realtek ALC897. This is the one that the ASRock board shares with the TUF Gaming B660 Plus WiFi D4.

The power delivery is “only” 9-phase. However, it is important to take into account what processors this board expects to use. It can comfortably handle 65 W TDP models even in boost with higher power draw, and it has been treated to avoid VRM overheating even when using the most powerful Core i9s, including the 12900KS. But we’ll look at that in the next chapter with the BIOS analysis.

Now let’s focus on what the CPU and SOC power delivery consists of. At the beginning is a two-channel PWM driver Richtek RT3628AE, which, in addition to one phase (SOC) with SinoPower SM4508NH and SM4373NAKP, mainly manages the Vishay SiC654 voltage regulators (Vcore). The maximum current loads in the specs have 50 A, for a total of 450 A (since there are nine of them).

However, the highest efficiency is usually around 30 % and up to 50–60 % can be comfortably cooled with simpler profiles, which are used in this case. These are aluminium monoliths weighing 69 and 85 grams. In order to achieve a larger radiation area, ASRock has created a few fins and notches on the passives.

• Contents
• ASRock B660 Steel Legend in detail
• What it looks like in the BIOS
• Methodology: Performance tests
• Methodology: How we measure power draw
• Methodology: Temperature and frequency measurements
• Test setup
• 3DMark
• Borderlands 3
• F1 2020
• Metro Exodus
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Total War Saga: Troy
• PCMark and Geekbench
• Web performance
• 3D rendering: Cinebench, Blender, ...
• Video 1/2: Adobe Premiere Pro
• Video 2/2: DaVinci Resolve Studio
• Graphics effects: Adobe After Effects
• Video encoding
• Audio encoding
• Photos: Adobe Photoshop, Affinity Photo, ...
• (De)compression
• (De)cryption
• Numerical computing
• Simulations
• Memory and cache tests
• M.2 (SSD) slots speed
• USB ports speed
• Ethernet speed
• Power draw curve (EPS + ATX connector) w/o power limits
• Power draw curve (EPS + ATX connector) with Intel’s power limits
• Total power draw (EPS + ATX connector)
• Achieved CPU clock speed
• CPU temperatures
• VRM temperatures – thermovision of Vcore and SOC
• SSD temperatures
• Chipset temperatures (south bridge)
• Conclusion