ASUS ROG X870E Crosshair Hero Review
Storage and Connectivity
Storage and Connectivity
If you’re really old, like me, you’ll know that music was vinyl for decades, tapes for about ten years, CDs for maybe ten years, and then MP3s/FLAC etc after that. Relatively music went from vinyl to MP3s with the other two options being, in hindsight, stopgaps. What has this to do with M.2? HDDs existed for decades, 2.5″ SSDs for about an afternoon, and now it’s all M.2. Prices plummeted, speeds went stratospheric, we left our Steam library installed even when we’d completed each game. The X870E Crosshair Hero has 5 M.2 slots. Plenty of space.
If you have been reading our reviews of the tiny drives you’ll know how good compact M.2s have become. ASUS Republic of Gamers department have you covered with an easy adaptor that lets you install these compact drives into your main rig. A fast way to get games onto your Steamdeck or similar.
As you would expect from a ROG product, the Crosshair Hero has beefy power capabilities. 18+2+2 phases. 110A on the first 18 and 2, and 90A on the last 2. It’s more than enough to power a seriously overclocked Ryzen 9 9950X.
The IO section of the Crosshair Hero will be familiar to anyone who has a reasonably recent motherboard, especially an AM5 one. The key upgrade on the X870E is two USB 4 40Gbps ports for ultimate throughput. We also love that this ASUS ROG model has WiFi 7 and two LAN ports. Loads of bandwidth.
