ASUS ROG X570 Crosshair VIII Extreme Review

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The Crosshair VIII Extreme takes a leaf out of the Dark Hero book by running with passive cooling everywhere. We know that passively cooled Chipsets are a key of the X570S, but having proved it’s doable on the regular X570 chipset it’s no surprise this flagship ASUS motherboard has gone in this direction.

  

At the top end are some of the chunkiest heatsinks we’ve ever seen. This board weighs an absolute ton. The Crosshair logo is laser-cut metal embossed onto metal, with the ROG logo there for all your RGB needs. At the bottom of this picture you can see the 2″ OLED display. ASUS have brought the LiveDash back for the Crosshair VIII Extreme. Hopefully they’ve fixed the dogs dinner of a software package that plagued the earlier versions. You can also see the separate DIMM.2 slot that allows you an extra pair of M.2 drives, should the other three slots not prove sufficient for your needs.

At the lower half the heatspreaders are a tight fit, indicating the care with which the Extreme has been designed. We love how the chipset heatsink is, ahem, mirrored by the mirrored one below it. Plenty of place for your M.2s without needing to take off the whole cover too. We’ll get to all the connectors and switches on the next page.

  

Around the back there is the backplate we’ve come to expect on a ROG product, with a huge cutout for your CPU cooler.

  

The top edge is probably the simplest to cover, so we’ll begin there. Naturally being a flagship motherboard the X570 Crosshair VIII Extreme has 8+8 pin CPU 12V inputs, right next to a fan header. You can also catch another glimpse of those chunky heatsinks.

  

Moving around we have two CPU fan headers sitting next to your voltage monitoring points. The Extreme uses horizontal connectors and begins with dedicated headers for radiator fans and water pumps. Nobody is buying this for air cooling after all. Below that the first two of the AURA Sync RGB headers. Let’s move further along on the next page.