ASUS X870E ROG Crosshair 2006 Preview

Introduction

Introduction

The ASUS ROG Crosshair 2006 is both new and old. Should you be in the hardware world for as long as us you’ll remember the first ASUS ROG offerings. With the 20 year anniversary of the original Crosshair motherboard happening this year ASUS have gone back in time. Fortunately for you we’re such hardware nerds that we own an original Nvidia chipset equipped Crosshair. So we can show you how well the ROG design team have aped their OG product.

Just because the aesthetics remind us of times of yore doesn’t mean the underneath does. The first Crosshair had an Nvidia NF590 chipset. If you wanted to run SLI back in the day, and we all did, you needed one of these. Nobody does any more, and that’s part of why Nvidia doesn’t make chipsets. The rot had set in even by the time of the Crosshair II. A product we reviewed back in the early days. But the first Crosshair supported the incredible AMD Athlon X2 processors. From the Thunderbird to these AMD totally shifted the market to them from Intel.

It is probably in keeping that the timing of this 20th anniversary is so apt then. AMD, who had floundered for a bit, returned with a bang with their Zen architecture and Ryzen processors. The X3D CPUs sell in such insane quantities that you could make an argument AMD have once again tipped the scales in their favour. With a motherboard that is bang up to date in the feature set, and reminds us of old glory days in the looks, the ASUS ROG Crosshair 2006 is the right product, at the right time.

Because we’re enthusiasts first and foremost we aren’t going to rely on stock images to tell this story. We’ve got a Crosshair on hand. This means we can show you what the old one looked like in detail, before demonstrating how well ASUS have replicated it. A memory refresher if you’re old. A history lesson if you’re not.

Oh speaking of history lessons, this flagship ROG Crosshair 1, the most insane AMD motherboard ROG made with dual LAN ports and a freaking screen retailed for … £126. If you need us we’ll be weeping in a corner.

Overview Comparison

We’ve accused ASUS of resting on their laurels recently. To the point we wondered if they could still shake things up. The answer is yes. Attention to detail is what made Republic of Gamers a household name, and this latest product has thought put into it everywhere you look. To wit, the box. Hell they’ve even brought back the old ROG G logo. Yes, fact fans, they didn’t always have an eye.

We’ll look in finer detail on the next page, but for now here is the OG Crosshair. Father to a lengthy lineage. Day one. If, like us, you were in the hardware world before this moment then the difference is clear. But if you weren’t it’s incredibly hard to explain how game-changing this motherboard was. Not even the most famous motherboard from the times, the DFI Lanparty NF4 – which your writer has in the loft somewhere – looked like this. Revolutionary barely covers it. Every motherboard for the next five or more years utilised this alternating colour plastics philosophy.

Now we’re not going into detail here. That’ll come in a couple of pages. However, you can easily see how much the Crosshair 2006 copies the aesthetics of the original, whilst still having all the features one expects from a modern AM5 motherboard. Coppery.

And for those of you who want to be saved from scrolling up and down to compare, here is a handy side by side.

You can really see how closely ASUS have matched the designs. If you can’t, don’t worry we’re about to go into exhaustive detail.