Board Layout

The actual color of the components and PCB is a slightly off-white and silver, with Gigabyte offering something closer to pure white with its range of Aorus boards, albeit for a higher price. Still, this means that the B850 Steel Legend Wi-Fi will work aesthetically in any color case. The rear of the PCB lacks any kind of additional cooling or components that we usually see on more expensive boards.


With USB4 removed from the equation, which is of course optional with the B850 chipset, and with only one PCIe Gen 5-capable M.2 port, bandwidth sharing is thankfully limited to just the fourth M.2 slot, which when occupied will disable the second PCIe x16 slot. The PCB only has two M.2 heatsinks, although these cover three of the four M.2 slots. This leaves a lot of the PCB free as there's also just one chipset to cool, but most of the mid-section including the unsightly CMOS battery and exposed M.2 port will be covered by your graphics card.


There are three fan headers above the CPU socket and while the primary CPU fan header hits a limit of 1 A/12 W, the combined total of the other five headers is up to 3 A/12 W, so there's a little more flexibility there for running numerous high power fans or even a watercooling pump. The six fan headers are one less than we'd usually expect, but ASRock has to cut corners somewhere and this is still plenty for your average system. Down the right side of the board are four SATA ports, a pair of USB 3.0 headers and a Type-C header, which impressively offers USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 support.


Another surprising addition given the price is a 2-pin thermistor header, which is ready to use thanks to the inclusion of thermistor probe in the box, which you can tie to specific fans in the EFI or software to cool certain parts of your system using something other than CPU or motherboard temperature. There are two further fan headers here as well as both 3-pin and 4-pin RGB headers, bringing the total for the former to three. The final fan header is located under the I/O panel, so ideally placed for powering rear case fans.


GPU release mechanisms are all the rage with the current crop of motherboards, but what's been interesting is the varied approaches taken. Here ASRock has what it calls Graphics Card Lite Release, which is essentially just an enlarged and extended release lever rather than a button or ASUS' infamous lift-out design. While it's not as elaborate as a button mechanism, it's easy to use and does what it needs to, which is to provide easier access to the lever in times of ever-increasing heatsink sizes.


Speaking of heatsinks, we have two for the M.2 ports, with a large finned one catering for the single PCIe Gen 5 M.2 slot at the top, which has a tool-free release mechanism and also cools your SSD on both sides. This should provide decent cooling for our PCIe Gen 5 SSD, which gets toasty when not cooled on both sides, although we are finally seeing single-sided PCIe Gen 5 SSDs such as Samsung's 9100 Pro.


The second M.2 slot lacks a heatsink, but there's a large slab of aluminium at the base of the PCB that cools the remaining two slots, which both support up to PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. This cools the top side of the SSDs only and also lacks a tool-free mechanism, so it's a little more fiddly and you'll need to reach for a small screwdriver.


The rear I/O panel offers a decent nine Type-A USB ports and ASRock hasn't just spammed USB 2.0 ports here to get the number up, as the majority of these are USB 3.0 or USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps. There's a single HDMI port, which incidentally is the only video output for the board itself as it lacks USB4, so can't output DisplayPort there. We also get USB BIOS Flashback, a pair of Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps ports, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet and ASRock has also found the funds to include Wi-Fi 7, albeit with none of the fancy new push-fit antennas. There are also gold-plated audio jacks and an optical output too.