ASUS Crosshair Evolution

Crosshair VI Hero

All of which brings us bang up to date with the Crosshair VI Hero we’ve only just recently reviewed. Even given the Crosshair V you can see that everything about this is different. The red has gone, to be replaced by the ASUS AURA RGB technology. It is fair to say that by the end of its life we were all sick to death of red, and RGB has come along just in time to breath new life into system builds everywhere. By giving us, the public, the ability to pick whichever colour we desire it’s obvious that the motherboard needs to be neutral and that’s why the Crosshair VI is monochrome.

The move to AM4 Ryzen and the X370 chipset, and at long last dispensing with the AM2/3 socket, has seen a significant change in every department. Although you’re already up to speed with our review we’ll have a quick run down. Gone is DDR3 support and in its place is blistering DDR4 support. New to the party is WiFi – in keeping with our wireless world (because heaven forfend we make it difficult to steal our data by running it through cables) – and the eternally popular USB has been boosted by the addition of USB 3.1 support in both Type-A and Type-C connection styles. We all know that USB connectors fit the third way out of the two possible ways, and Type-C eliminates this fumbling about by fitting first time, every time. Storage has moved beyond mere SATA 6 Gb/s to the crazy fast speeds of M.2. We’ve gained dedicated water pump headers, addition power for the CPU, LN2 jumpers for those crazy/rich enough to go sub-zero, and all the ROG specific overclocking features in their latest iterations.

It is amazing that even in the ten brief years that the Crosshair has been on the market how far technology has moved on. This is particularly brought into sharp relief when you consider that just a shade before the release of the original Crosshair we were running parallel ports, serial ports, and the idea of SATA connections and the bandwidth afforded by DDR2 were mere pipe dreams. We started at multi-coloured plastics on a motherboard where even the idea of a black PCB was still new and daring, where motherboards wore their copper proudly and connectors were vertical. We have ended up with a motherboard dripping with all the latest technologies, high on bandwidth for our media heavy lifestyles.

It’s been a fun ride. I wonder where we’ll be in another ten years….

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