ASRock Intel Core Ultra Z890 Steel Legend WiFi 7 ATX LGA1851RL-ILM Motherboard DDR5 M.2 PCle 5.0 ARGB SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Thunderbolt

flashed latest bios on bare board before starting build (no cpu, memory, display, etc, just psu)people saying usb2/fat32 is most reliable for update, so formatted an old 4gb usb2 stickdownload zipped rom from asrock site, unzip, rename bios image file to creative.rom, copy to empty thumb drivewith psu not plugged into wall socket connect 24 pin connector from psu to mobo, insert thumb drive with single file 'creative.rom' into the ***usb port with white box drawn around it***, power on psuhold button labeled 'bios flbk' for 3 or 4 seconds until the LED starts flashing; wait 5 minutes or so until the LED stops flashing, power off psu and unplug from wall then finish the buildinstalled xubuntu 24.10 and it booted fine first try, ethernet and wifi see the router, 265k onboard graphics functioning with single HD panel (may try hi-res multi-mon later)sometimes linux has problems with bleeding-edge hw, but no issues so far... huzzah!*** update ***running intel arc xe2 graphics (no dgpu) with one HD panel (via mobo hdmi port) and two 2560x1440 panels (via mobo thunderbolt ports)this is a development machine so works great for my purposesusing optical out to dac for native audio (works in my debian 12.8 vm's as well)

while this is among the lowest-priced arrow lake motherboards at just shy of $200, the z980 pro-a wifi has a good degree of amenities, including thunderbolt/usb-c support, and an nvme m.2 port with an included heatsink. currently i am waiting for a price drop on graphics cards (and perhaps a little longer given the supposedly obscene price point of the 50 series) and am running on the motherboard's on-board graphics, which seems to fare perfectly well for the purposes of 4k video playback and very light gaming, using the ultra 7 265k integrated graphics support.overall, i am happy with this motherboard - it was an easy, no-nonsense installation with all the expandability i need, with very good wireless connection using the included antennas. come next time i need a motherboard, i may very well try asrock again. good stuff.

Even worse than the Gigacrap I bought at first that was DOA, this board *kind of* worked which made it 100x harder to figure out what the problem was.Week one: everything is working great. A welcome change from the Gigabyte that went down in flames.Week two: Wait, what? Why don't any of my headphones connect? Go into device manager and the bluetooth straight up doesn't exist. Repeated attempts to force the drivers in and it never shows up. I finally give up and steal my daughter's BT dongle.Week three: Oh, new drivers for my 5080. I'll just go ahead and install them and reboot. PC refuses to reboot and reverts to basic settings. Reapply the proper settings for my 265k and memory and it's all great.......until I need to reboot again.Order a new motherboard and magically everything is fine. /sigh. Let's hope the Steel Legend does better than this or I'm going back to MSI, even though they're stupidly overpriced.

Good so far.My only complaint is there is only one connection for fans at the top of the board. So if you're running a rear and 2 front fans plus CPU fans, you're going to need to buy several fan extension cables if you're interested in controlling fan speeds separately.

It lite right up with no fails. Gives you everyting the $500 Motherboards have at half the cost. I've already own another Asrock Z90 from 8 years ago and it's still running strong. I'm upgrading only because support on Win 10 is ending soon. I'll continue to use it as a server. Only one slight downside, theres no manual included so you'll have to get one online. I got the White Steel Legend with WiFi and got the White Crucial Pro 32 GB set 4x16 (64 GB Total) with the Ultra 7 CPU. The System runs great so far after a week. You'll need to download the LAN drivers before you install windows if you want to use Microsoft account to sign in. All in all, so far so good.

It's a pretty good board. I much prefer ASRock as to Asus, especially after so many gen 13 & 14th I9s were burnt up. Quite well arranged. Running a soft RAID 5 w/SN770s, have Linux Mint, Win 10 and 11 running. It makes the best out of a T705.I think it performs well - Are you familiar with Cinebench 24? With default XTU overclock settings it runs the high 2500s All Cores (285k).

It’s a new product therefore immediately updates are necessary. Initially had an incredibly slow boot up time (5 minutes before splash screen would even display). Flashed the bios to the newest (non beta) version and it fixed it. System has been stable so far paired with an until ultra 7 265k. Haven’t tinkered with overclocking quite yet but so far so good. My only issue which was a minor issue is the location for the chassi fan pins. They’re all lined up on the bottom of the board aside from one designed for the exhaust fan that mounts to the back of the case. Purely a minor inconvenience solved using an adapter of course.