EK and ASUS team up to create the ROG Crosshair VIII Formula X570 motherboard

AMD is aiming for the top with their Ryzen 3rd Generation processors, and that means that their board partners are excited to bring out motherboards which are capable of utilising the company’s latest technologies to their fullest. 

With up to 12 cores to power and cool and PCIe 4.0 devices to manage, motherboard makers are going to have a difficult time designing and manufacturing their latest designs. ASUS, when creating their high-end ROG Crosshair VIII Formula motherboard has decided to partner with EK, a world-class water cooling manufacturer to develop a hybrid cooled X570 mainboard, which will be able to push AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X to its limits with a liquid cooled VRM setup. 

The ROG Crosshair VIII Formula also ships with two PCIe 4.0 compatible M.2 slots, which are capable of driving PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSDs, which have already been shown to offer read speeds that can extend as high as 5GB/s. RAID two of these bad boys together and this motherboard could offer 10GB/s read speeds.  

On top of the motherboard’ I/O shield, ASUS are offering users a 1.3-inch LiveDash OLED screen which can be customised to showcase post codes, system temperatures or other important information, Beside this screen the first of the motherboard’s two motherboard water cooling access points are visible, though it is worth noting that this motherboard does work when passively cooled.  

For more traditional storage mediums, ASUS has given their Crosshair VIII Formula eight SATA ports, granting users access to obscene amounts of HDD or SSD storage (two SATA slots will be disabled when both M.2 slots are occupied). On the rear I/O of this motherboard, WIFI 6 support is also available alongside Intel Gigabit Ethernet and an Aquantia 5G ethernet controller. Yes, this board doesn’t offer the full 10Gb experience, but it’s more than enough to outspeed most consumer networking equipment. 

As far as RGB lighting is concerned, the Crosshair VIII Formula features integrated RGB lighting, two 4-pin RGB headers and two three-pin addressable RGB headers, which enables users of this motherboard to easily control their lighting setup using ASUS’ RGB Sync software. Two water cooling pump headers are also available as well as five standard fan headers, 1 high amperage fan header and headers for coolant temperature/flow rate sensors. 

Below are some details on this motherboard’s VRMs and their EK-made cooling solution