ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E Review: Z590 On A Budget

Conclusion

When it comes to finding the optimal performance point for Intel's Rocket Lake processors, pairing it up with a Z590 motherboard yields the best results. This includes double the bandwidth between the processor and chipset, native USB 3.2 G2x2 ports, and support for Intel's Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E CNVI's. Despite many options on Z590 to select from, there's a large variety to cater to different users at different price points. Out of it all though, there are no really budget options, but the ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E at $200 is going to be a good option for a Z590 budget build.

On paper, the ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E looks like an interesting selection for users on a tight budget or those looking to cut down on certain 'premium' features and instead spend that on other areas such as storage or memory. At the heart of the feature set is support for PCIe 4.0 when used with Rocket Lake, and this equates to a full-length PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and one PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slot for users to benefit from the extra bandwidth available. Due to the chipset being natively PCIe 3.0, the second full-length slot is locked to PCIe 3.0 x4 and a further two PCIe 3.0 x4/SATA M.2 slots making the board's of onboard M.2 real estate to three. Other storage options include six SATA ports, all with support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 arrays.

Touching on connectivity, there's a modest selection of input and output on the rear panel, with the most substantial of this coming from two USB 3.2 G2 ports, one Type-C, and one Type-A. Users can leverage the chipset's native USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C support via a front panel header, which could be frustrating to some, but it's a cost-cutting measure and more than acceptable on a board of this standard. Other inclusions on the rear panel include an HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 video output pairing, with networking consisting of a Realtek RTL8125BG 2.5 GbE controller and Intel AX210 Wi-Fi 6E CNVi pairing. This is considered premium and is a testament to vendors offering better grade networking as standard; 2.5 GbE is slowly becoming the new standard in motherboard Ethernet (Ian: at least on boards $200 and up).

Looking at the performance, the Steel Legend did perform somewhat competitively with other Z590 models tested, but it seemed to have a bit more throttling than others, scoring lowest in a couple of the CPU testing. We saw good power consumption figures across the board in our system tests, but it gave us the slowest POST times from any other Z590 board tested so far. As we generally see with consumer ASRock boards, out-of-the-box DPC latency performance was good. Still, we noticed that the Steel Legend lagged behind other Z590 models in our computational tests. This wasn't the case in our gaming tests, but it does feel that the power options aren't as aggressive by default as some other models.

When we overclocked on the ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E, we saw pretty loose VDroop control across our testing, with overcompensation hitting the 5-6% mark over what was set in the firmware. While this doesn't sound like a problem, adding 5-10% on the CPU VCore can translate to a lot more regarding temperature and power consumption increases. Even in our VRM thermal testing, the Steel Legend tends to dump all of the heat into the power plane, with the heatsinks attached not as effective as ASRock would have liked. While everything is still within an acceptable level, we would still expect better.

Final Thoughts

The ASRock Z590 Steel Legend WiFi 6E is currently available at Amazon for $200, representing fantastic value for money considering it has triple M.2, Wi-Fi 6E, 2.5 GbE, and has much of the benefit in terms of performance as any other Z590 model. The only caveat is we felt ASRock could have been slightly more aggressive with its power settings out of the box, which would push it more into the realms of competitiveness with other Z590 models we've tested. Outside of that, the Z590 Steel Legend is a decent board with a good core feature set including 2.5 GbE and Wi-Fi 6E networking, but for a very reasonable price. Users looking for a budget-friendly Z590 motherboard at the heart of a system should at least consider it, especially in the sub $200 market space.