As an entry-to-mid-range X670E design, the X670E Steel Legend doesn’t arrive with the host of accessories which you might expect from a ‘board hitting $300. The wireless antenna is an expectation considering the platform natively supports WIFI 6E, but a graphics card support bracket is a nice addition considering the weight of some of the latest high performance RTX 4000-series and upcoming RX 7000-series will be. The full list of accessories is:




This motherboard conforms to a standard ATX form factor, making it compatible with the vast majority of PC cases on the market today. ASRock’s design team have built on the Steel Legend black/white camo colour scheme by extending it to the rear IO shroud, chipset heatsinks and M.2 heatspreaders. It’s not quite the blank canvas some would prefer, but has just enough going on to make it look at home on a predominantly white build without succumbing to blandness.


Thanks to an AM5 socket this motherboard supports only AMD’s Ryzen 7000-series CPUs, including the daunting Ryzen 9 7950X. Users new to LGA sockets should be aware that the pins are exceptionally fragile, requiring greater care than prior PGA-based AMD desktop solutions. By the same token, the Ryzen 7000-series CPU itself should be much more robust due to the lack of pins on its underside.

AM4 CPU coolers which utilise the clip retention system should be compatible out of the box, but other designs may need an upgrade kit before the model is supported. High performance cooling will be a must - even in only its default configuration the 7950X TDP is 170W, and potentially will exceed that under certain loads even when not overclocked.

Feeding the CPU directly are two 8-pin 12V connectors, below and to the right of which are two large heatsinks that help cool the power circuitry. The 24-pin connector is along the right edge, next two USB 3.2 Gen 1 and 3.2 Gen 2 front panel headers. Fan headers are located next to the CPU socket (1x), on the motherboard’s top-right edge (2x), and along the bottom edge (3x) to a not particularly impressive total of six.


ASRock have chosen to place the RGB headers (3 and 4-pin) at the top-right and bottom-left of the board, giving you some options for cable routing to supported lighting. On-board lighting is subdued - two strips to the right and below the chipset heatspreader as well as the Steel Legend logo itself are all that users and bank on out of the box.

Up to 128GB of DDR5 memory in 4x32GB DIMMs is supported, although at this stage you’re unlikely to be able to hit the advertised 6600MHz OC in this configuration. Each slot has been reinforced, making it just a touch more robust when installing and removing DIMMs. The CPU has a dual-channel memory controller so two matching DIMMs are a reasonable configuration on all but the most RAM-hungry of scenarios.


To the right of the DIMM slots and between the top-most RGB headers and 24-pin ATX connector is an indicator LED array, which should help to troubleshoot problems during the POST and boot-up sequence.

Not visible under the motherboard heatspreaders are not one but two X670 chipsets, which come together to offer X670E & X670’s significant peripheral I/O options. B560E & B650 by contrast are equipped with just one of these, effectively halving the number of available USB and integrated storage options.


The storage support for ASRock’s X670E Steel Legend prioritises NVMe M.2 slots over SATA connectors, with four of the former being paired with just four SATA 3 6Gps headers. Only one of the NVMe slots supports PCIe 5.0; each of the others are ‘limited’ to PCIe 4.0 via the chipset controller. A simple heatspreader covers the M.2 slots, offering limited cooling.

The main PCI-Express x16 slot supports PCIe 5.0 signalling to discrete GPUs, and has been reinforced to better support heavy cards that put a lot of weight on this sensitive connector. There’s ample room between this and the PCIe x1 slot for thick 2-slot coolers, and plenty between the top and bottom PCIe X16 slots for even gargantuan RTX 4090 designs.

ASRock have leveraged RealTek’s ALC1220 Audio Codec and opted for electrically isolated (as much as is viable) left and right channels by passing them through different layers. Nahimic’s influence is through the included software suite that augments the audio soundscape with better implied location info and highlighting of more subtle sounds. Voice comms should also be notably clearer with this solution than standard.


Finally we come to the rear I/O, which has an admittedly unconventional layout. At the top are the HDMI and DisplayPort 1.4 graphics output options, taking advantage of the on-board GPU present on all 7000-series CPUs. Wifi is next, supporting up-to WiFi 6E, then a ‘BIOS Flashback’ button that will allow users to flash the BIOS without booting up the system or even installing a CPU. Two banks of four USB connectors support USB 2.0 and 3.0 respectively, and would be priorities for keyboard and mouse. Realtek Gbps LAN and two more USB 3.0 ports are next, followed by the 2.5G LAN, USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps and USB 3.2 Gen 2 20Gbps (Type-C) ports respectively. Finally, Mic-In, Line-out and SPDIF audio round out the connectivity options.

Clearly the hardware featureset is far from bare-bones, but nothing leaps out as a premium addition or unique solution to a recognised issue in the platform. As a result the X670E Steel Legion has the air of a good value entry-point rather than premium performance or deluxe feature design which is a little at odds with a >£350 price point. It’s relative naturally - X670E has turned out to be a very pricey beast in many markets - but those expecting more at this price point may be a little disappointed.