ASRock Steel Legend Intel Z690 LGA 1700 ATX DDR4-SDRAM Motherboard

We're basically on day 2 of this machine, so it may still end in a fireball, but so far I'm very pleased. Lots of SATA connections for my compulsive collection of drives, two nvme sata connectors (with built-in heat syncs) if I decide to add a second nvme drive. Two m.2 connectors for other expansion (I used a wifi/bluetooth card I already had, so didn't try those). 7.1 audio onboard — now I'll have to upgrade my sound system to take advantage of it.

This motherboard has to be updated to latest bios for a 13gen cpu before it will work .. I've been thur 3 different motherboards trying to get it to work ended up bending pins on the first one bought a 2nd motherboard couldn't get it to work Sent back for a refund. Contacted asrock to rma the bent pin board .. they replaced it free of charge . Just had to pay shipping. Replacement came with updated bios and working now after 2 months of trying to build my first pc ..

Around Thanksgiving I finally decided to retire my old 4790k and get something with a bit more horsepower. My old Z97 Pro 4M was pretty good to me, so I was already leaning towards Asrock for a budget build. After reading numerous reviews and balancing them against my incredible cheapness, I went for the 13600k and an Asrock Z690 Steel Legend. I figured the initial setup was enough to last me another 7 or so years, and I could always overclock to squeeze out a little more performance.I know motherboard manufacturers have been pretty liberal with stock voltages these days and new cpus run hot, but the first time I fired up Cinebench R23 at stock, every fan in my case was screaming. When I did a run of Prime95 with HWinfo64 up, my cpu was at over 1.5 volts vcore, 230 watts, and high 90s temp. Pretty sure a little bit of damage occured. Subsequent bios versions cut the voltage to safer levels, but I decided to wait on overclocking until I understood Raptor Lake better.After learning a few things, I came back to try and overclock a little. It's been said before that Arock's bios can be a little wonky. So are their voltage adjustments. You can squeeze a decent overclock out of your processor but fine tuning it seemed like a incredible chore. I could get incredibly low voltages on Prime95 stable on slight overclocks but fine tuning voltages for increased frequencies was terrible. The owner's manual lists settings that don't even exist in the bios, and the bios fails to describe what some of the more important settings do. I bought an overclocking board to overclock my cpu, not heat my room while I fail stability tests.Asrock is kind of the little engine that could with their products, doing more for less when compared to the competition. If they still have in-house overclockers, they should probably pay them to release some in-depth bios tutorials. While the board is generally fine, I ended up swapping it out for a Z790 Tomahawk. There's more info online from the MSI crowd for tuning your motherboard, and the bios adjustments generally do something.

I run a small computer repair shop and I've purchased from ASRock for a bit now because their components have generally been reliable. Unfortunately this time around I had a pretty dramatic failure happen on the motherboard when a component exploded on a customer's build after around 2 weeks of use. Unfortunately due to needing to wait for other parts before building it was 1 day past the return window and they wouldn't make an exception even for their obviously very defective product.So in the future I don't think I'll be purchasing or recommending ASRock to my clients because of their abysmal customer service and the fact that my business needs to eat the $150 for a new board.

The media could not be loaded. This motherboard is fantastic, love the lighting to the performance and the upgrade path, worth every dime to penny for this motherboard. Came with great packaging, so no damage could happen. No bent pins on the slot for the cpu no dents no missing parts. Just honestly a great motherboard.

El board tiene todo lo que se necesita para ser un board estable y duradero, una muy buena opcion para quienes no quieren gastar demasiado. Asrock es muy buena opcion.

Good Product

This motherboard was fantastic. I just built my first custom PC, this was my second motherboard, as we thought my first was faulty (I actually ended up receiving a defective CPU which was the cause of my issues). It's absolutely lovely, and is geared towards DIY custom builds. The instruction manual is extremely thorough, with photos and diagrams, parts lists, super specific details, and even a DVD (which I assume had more setup info on it, but I didn't use it so I'm not certain). The package came with a ton of extra hardware for different setup options, and it came with a little keychain replica of the board, which I thought was a cute little detail. The board itself has RGBs around the entire PCB, making it light up my case really nicely, it has 4 separate POST-Status error lights, it has a ton of slots for parts making it highly configurable and customizable. The I/O panel has a wide range of ports, as well as a Flash-BIOS button (which is great for a beginner, because I couldn't begin to know how to update BIOS otherwise in the event that my PC didn't POST), and the board has a handful of headers for front-panel case ports. This board was lovely to build with and has great features.Unfortunately I received mine damaged, it was a previous return, and I received it open-box. After replacing my CPU (which, again, was faulty from the start, causing my PC not to POST), my PC still didn't POST, and I had to go back to my original motherboard. I would've loved for this board to work out, as it was fantastic, but I'll be keeping ASRock in mind for future builds.