ASUS ROG X470 Crosshair VII Hero Review

Up Close cont

As you would expect from a premium ROG motherboard, connection options and headers abound on the Crosshair. A good spread of fan headers is hugely important when it comes to making your system look neat and tidy as well as freeing you up to get creative with your cooling.

  

Much like the top right hand corner, the bottom right has two headers for RGB and addressable options, as well as a good selection of pump and fan headers for those who want to push their cooling hard. Looking at how tight the front panel connectors are it’s a good thing ASUS have included a breakout block to make it easier for those who haven’t got fingers that could double as chopsticks.

  

Such is the compact nature of the PCB due to the huge amount ASUS have managed to include, it took a little bit of eagle-eyed spotting to see the breakout line that separates the audio from the rest of the PCB, but it’s there. You can also see some safe boot and OC retry buttons, for those of you who want to push the Crosshair VII Hero to its limits.

  

Temperatures can greatly effect the speeds you can obtain from your M.2 drive and so it’s good to see ASUS providing a heat spreader to hopefully lessen and performance fluctuations.

  

If you haven’t yet joined the M.2 bandwagon then the six SATA 6Gb/s ports should provide enough connectivity for your drives. You can also see a few fan headers here as well as the USB 3.1 front panel connector.

  

Whilst the Republic of Gamers brand might be tailored towards gaming, they also provide outstanding overclocking capabilities and to this end there are voltage monitoring points next to the ATX 24pin power, should you need them.

  

Finally the IO portion which shows how high end the Crosshair VII Hero is. There are USB 3.1 headers of both Type A and Type C, plentiful USB 3.0 connectors, aerials for the AC WiFi, Gigabit LAN and the excellent SupremeFX audio. There is even a combined PS/2 port should you have an old keyboard you’re particularly fond of.

At last, the wait is over. Who wants to see some overclocking results? Us too, let’s take a look.