ASRock B450M Steel Legend Review

Hardware

Audio & Rear IO

What you notice about this board unlike the X470 or X570 boards is that it carries an HDMI and DisplayPort output. Of course, this is for the AM4 APUs more than CPUs, so if you’re planning on using a Ryzen CPU, this feature unfortunately doesn’t mean much to you. On the other hand, you do get a single USB Type-C connector along with Type-A of course. A total of 8 USB ports on the REAR IO panel on a budget board is pretty impressive no matter how you look at it.

As a budget board, one of the sacrifices made is in the audio department. Instead of the popular ALC 1220 CODEC, the B450M Steel Legend has to make do with the ALC892 CODEC. Now audio isn’t determined solely from the CODEC and in fact in many instances it isn’t relevant. However, the decision to go with this chip is in line with the moderate spec on the rest of the board. In terms of audio quality, you can hear it if you’re listening out for that sort of thing, but in everyday use, you’ll be hard pressed to notice.

There’s no Purity Audio magic here, but it does get the job done reliably.

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