ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero Review

Conclusion

Conclusion

We don’t think we’re giving away any secrets if we suggest that the ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero is a great motherboard. It also isn’t a huge surprise. After all, we’ve seen from previous Heros, be they regular ones or Dark ones, that ASUS are committed to making the Crosshair the flagship of their AMD motherboard range.

If you’re a use who likes to live on the cutting edge of technology, there is a lot to recommend the Crosshair Hero. The amount of connectivity options are astounding. Because it’s based around the new X870E chipset you’re getting both PCI Express slots in 5.0 form. There are five M.2 slots. Five is a number we’ve seen before. However, the X870E chipset and Ryzen 9000 CPU combination means that you get three Gen 5 M.2 slots and two Gen 4 ones. If you’ve got the money to populate them with speedy devices, you’ll be in hog heaven.

On the subject of storage, whilst the new AMD chipset might have reduced the number of SATA ports, ASUS have given us a SlimSAS connector on the Crosshair Hero. SCSI drives were the ones of our youth, or certainly your writers youth, so it’s curious that such a high-end, leading edge motherboard such as this includes one. We’d expect it on a workstation motherboard, but a flagship desktop one?

Elsewhere the X870E comes with all the USB you could need. AMDs business model lets them concentrate on incremental improvements. Because of this the X870 and X870E chipsets have USB4. 40 Gbps. The Crosshair Hero gives you these and another 8 USB ports on the rear to boot. That’s without including the 60W front USB Type-C and its friends. About the only curious thing we found was that the NitroPath DRAM certainly has potential and makes sense on paper, just it didn’t really make a difference in our testing. Perhaps you need to push your memory to the bleeding edge to make the most of it.

The ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero is everything we’ve come to expect from a Republic of Gamers motherboard. It’s easy to use, blessed with all the connectivity you could desire, and performs incredibly well. It lives up to the lofty expectations of the Crosshair name but until we know a confirmed price we just cant give this one an award. We need to know if the ‘leaks’ were correct or not. If its £750 its a tough board to recommend when the Strix does everything you could ask for….

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