ASRock B650E Steel Legend Wi-Fi Review: More SATA, Please

Steel appearance meets solid performance, but some features are lacking for the price

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ASRock B650E Steel Legend Wi-Fi
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Joe Shields
Joe Shields
Staff Writer, Components

Joe Shields is a staff writer at Tom’s Hardware. He reviews motherboards and PC components.

28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Captain_Hook
    I guess the pros are swapped with the cons? ;)
    Reply
  • CircuitJammer
    Honestly, SATA is on its way out. Two ports is probably sufficient for 99% of users. If you need more, buy something else.
    Reply
  • helper800
    CircuitJammer said:
    Honestly, SATA is on its way out. Two ports is probably sufficient for 99% of users. If you need more, buy something else.
    I would personally not mind only 2-4 sata ports as long as I have 3+ m.2 slots.
    Reply
  • PiranhaTech
    If it's that high of price and they want to reduce the ports, they should start integrating the likes of SAS ports into the boards. Each SAS port is easily expanded to 4 SATA devices

    I forgot what the other drive tech was.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    Only 2 SATA ports, wtf.
    Still using USB 2.0 ports for both the back and board.
    Only 1 USB-C port.
    2.5Gbit/s instead of 10Gbit/s.
    Ancient audio codecs.

    And you want how much for this?!

    No thanks.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    Honestly, SATA is on its way out. Two ports is probably sufficient for 99% of users.

    You are being ridiculous. Blu-Ray players and HDD still use SATA, and that isn't going to change any times soon.

    Maybe you never back-up anything on your PC, but plenty of people do, and most people use HDD for that. HDD that use SATA.

    Having only 2 SATA ports makes this board a no-go for anyone doing back-ups and using optical media.

    And if you never do any serious work on your PC that requires a back-up, then why are you on TomsHardware or use a PC. Buy a console and chromebook instead.
    Reply
  • Maebius
    Just calling it a mid-range offering is a crime :p
    Reply
  • Gavin Greenwalt
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    You are being ridiculous. Blu-Ray players and HDD still use SATA, and that isn't going to change any times soon.

    Ok... So one HDD on SATA and one Blu-ray drive on the other SATA done.

    Most people backup to external drives these days anyway. Also optical drives are rare.

    Also... Also... Optical for backup?? At 50GB per disk? Even a full spindle of 50 blurays is 2.5TB. You could get a small external 4TB HDD for $80 vs a 100 disc spindle of Blurays for $150.

    The HDD is more compact and cheaper. You could (and should) but two USB drives and off-site one of them to a friend's house for the price of Blurays which also aren't rated for archival.

    Or you could get like 2-3 years of cloud storage.

    And for the handful of people living in the age of Limp Biskit and other 2000s nostalgia there are m.2 SAS cards with 8x SATA ports and you can go crazy without even using a single pcie slot.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    You could (and should) buy two USB drives and off-site one of them to a friend's house

    Proper back-up is done with RAID.

    Not some USB drive you attach on a sunday afternoon, while losing half your data from the week.
    Reply
  • adrian84481
    I don't see anything wrong with the price or specs here. Seriously, it's a 4x DDR5 mobo, with PICe5.0 M.2 (and an additional 2x M.2 slots), decent VRM setup, decent connectivity (USB3.2 and WiFi 6E). Of course price is going to be high (AM5/DDR5, duh!). Complaining about "only" 2x SATA ports in 2023 is a bit of a stretch. 2x SATA is more than enough nowadays, you can still have one SATA SSD and one optical drive (because not all of us have coin to spend on large M.2 SSDs), or a "backup" HDD and an optical drive (yes, quotes around "backup", as a proper backup is stored off-machine, because, you know, crypto lockers and data corruption due to various reasons and physical theft and stuff).
    Reply