Smoothing Groups in Blender? Autosmooth off with smooth shaded



Autosmooth on with Mark Sharp

I come from a 3dsMax background so the usual process is to create a mesh, some of the elements are bevelled all around while some have no bevelling. I would set the smoothing of the entire object to 1 smoothing groups making all the bevelled elements perfect while the unbevelled ones will look bad. Then manual set smoothing groups for those elements. All this is done on a single merged mesh.
I'm replicating this process of modeling in blender but i have issues. The mark sharp on the autosmoothed off version does not seam to harden the edges. Trying to clear sharp on the autosmoothed version does not work as well.
Is there anyway to do this other than edge split? I believe edge split literally splits the edges which is not what I want.

Right, I added the blend file. Using blender 2.90
Considering you are talking about the Look of the Normal, here's what you can do -
Select the Edges you want to make them Sharper, now press Ctrl + E or go to Edge menu, Select Mark Sharp.
Now You will get the Marked edges sharp with the smoothing you applied.