ASUS Maximus IX Hero Preview

Up Close cont

There is loads to pay attention to in our top screenshot. We find support for a full length M.2 drive, dedicated water pump header – in addition to the AIO pump header at the top of the board – the first of two RGB headers for the AURA technology, a bunch of regular fan headers and the onboard buttons. The quality of all the heatsinks, as we said on the previous page, are particularly good. Thick, look great, nicely designed. It’s a good demonstration that the devil is indeed in the details. Above the main PCIe slot we have the second M.2 socket, but taking a closer look at the SATA ports we see that the SATA Express slots are definitely something which has – like so many technologies – disappeared as quickly as it arrived. The introduction of NVMe and affordable M.2 drives probably stepped over the minor bandwidth increases it brought.