ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial Review
Introduction and Technical Specifications
Introduction
There is suddenly a rash of AMD motherboards appearing on the market. Whether it’s because the last gen Intel wasn’t all that, and the next big one is a little bit too far away, we don’t know. Perhaps it’s simply that AMD cannot manufacture their X3D Ryzen CPUs fast enough. As a business decision why wouldn’t you build more AM5 boards?
The newest entry comes in straight at the ultra high end level. The rarefied air where we find Maximus Extreme’s, Aorus Xtreme’s and MSI Godlikes. In this instance it’s the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial. Glacial because of the white we imagine. You only need to cast an eye upon the specifications to realise that this could just as easily be called the Crosshair Extreme. It’s got high bandwidth, high power, high speed out of the wazoo.
Heck we’re writing this having finished our testing and can spoil things immediately by saying that, if money is no object, and performance is your goal, this is an easy buy. But that’s not the whole story. Thus before we get bogged down in telling you things you already know*, we can get down to brass tacks.
*things you already know : It’s a ROG product so it’ll be fast. It’s a flagship one so it will also be expensive. White is the prevailing theme so the boss will love it. It is the foundation for a Ryzen system, so it’s going to sell in vast quantities. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. The Mona Lisa has an enigmatic smile. It was his sled. A testament to modern living there that any other well known facts we could use for comic effect – the Earth is round, the Universe is expanding, you should help the poor and needy – are likely to invite flame wars.
Technical Specifications
ASUS NitroPath technology has been seen before in this parish, and it’s fair to say it’s one of those things that just works. Often a company will proclaim an improved design, but this one really is. With the current RAM prices we’ll always enjoy the option to make our current RAM faster for ‘free’.
With a built-in Vapor Chamber we expect the M.2 heatsink to do a spectacular job at keeping even the fastest M.2s running at peak performance.
