AMD Zen 4 Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 9 7950X Review

ASUS Crosshair Motherboard and G.Skill DDR5

The supplied DDR5 memory kit is from G.Skill in the form of their TridentZ5 Neo. 2 16GB modeuls rated at DDR5-4800 should provide a nice balance between latency and raw speed.

  
  

Our test motherboard is the new ASUS ROG Crosshair X670E Hero. We know how popular the ROG Crosshair Hero was in the X570 platform, and things should be similar with the new Zen 4 architecture. We will be bringing you a wider range of X670 motherboards in coming days, but naturally we wanted to focus upon the processors at launch.

  

The IO/Heatsink display is even larger than before. Perfect if you want to show off your designs to the world, or simply do what we all do whenever we’re given the option to customise something and write your name. Assuming ASUS let us customise it.

  

Like all ASUS ROG products the Crosshair X670E Hero has plenty of connectivity options and a goodly amount of fan headers too. The heatsinks also look chunky and we like the fairly simple aesthetic. We’re also big fans of putting the RGB and ARGB headers next to each other.

  

Plenty of M.2 slots lie in wait for you beneath the heatspreaders, and both PCI Express 5.0 slots are braced in readiness for your beefy graphics card. Particularly good to know with the RDNA3 and Nvidia 4000 series rapidly approaching.

  

The old OC3D maxim that you can tell the approximate price point and target audience of a motherboard simply by looking at the back IO section holds true here. We can’t imagine even the most peripheral rich user will fill all these up.

  

Before we cover the processor up with our giant AIO, look at how well it sits in the socket. That heatsink design makes even more sense now. Maybe it’s just us, but it’s aesthetically pleasing.