Published: September 30, 2024 | Source: ASUS | Author: Tom Logan

ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero Review

Board Tour

As regular readers will know, we love to tour the motherboard. How many times have you been looking to buy something online and found it impossible to see something in detail? We definitely have, and that’s why we do motherboards this way. We have no idea what you might feel is important. This way, we don’t have to guess, and you aren’t stuck asking strangers on Twitter to take a photo of the thing that matters. Beginning on the Crosshair Hero with the two 8 pin 12V inputs.

As part of the ASUS ROG range one would expect to find lots of cooling on the X870E Crosshair Hero, and you won’t be disappointed. The top right corner alone has five headers including an AIO pump header for CPU cooling. It’s worth paying attention to the DIMM slots here too. Not just because the two primary ones are, paradoxically, A2 and B2, but because there is a new style of slot.

Here are the slots from the side. The height is shorter, and the connection point is at the peak. Regular DIMM slots touch the memory modules in the middle of an imaginary S. The Crosshair Hero has NitroPath DRAM which touches the module at the tip of an s. This reduces resonance and also increases overclocking headroom. According to their testing this difference alone was enough to increase from 8200MHz to 8600MHz successful overclocking on an otherwise identical system. ASUS have a monopoly on this technology until 2025. Anything that improves performance we’re on board with.

The addition of a SlimSAS connector has us baffled. SCSI was the stuff of our youth (hello to anyone who still owns an IDE drive). Why has it come back, and why on Desktops rather than just Workstation motherboards? Is there a future hardware release of which we’re unaware? Okay there always are, but it’s rare a wholesale reintroduction of a previous tech happens without some whispers escaping NDAs.

Moving around to the front panel connectors and plenty of front USB options. Those who like colourful rigs will note all AURA headers on the Crosshair Hero are Addressable rather than stock RGB. Nice.

Lastly another set of fan headers sit next to the front panel audio. We know many of you are curious about the M.2 options, so let’s pull the heatsink off and have a closer look.