ASUS Z590 ROG Maximus XIII Hero Review
Introduction
We often talk about how quickly technology evolves, and we think that the ASUS ROG Maximus range is the perfect encapsulation of this endless progress. It wasn’t that long ago – well it was but it doesn’t feel it – that the ASUS Rampage was the motherboard for those who wanted all the power, whilst the Maximus was for everyone who couldn’t afford to spend the earth on their new mobo.
Such has been the rampant progress by Intel on their mainstream CPUs that the days in which you had to buy their top end ones are behind us. The LGA2011 socket is less about high end gaming, and very much limited to the enthusiast who does masses of rendering. The mainstream range, LGA1200 and soon to be joined by the 11th Gen Intel CPUs, are now such high performers that most of us stick to the Intel models which provide the perfect balance between price and performance.
For ASUS this has meant that the Rampage might still be the flagship motherboard range, but it’s been left out in the cold as the Maximus has taken over as both the big seller and the one that still has a raft of enthusiast features. The latest iteration of said Maximus is here in the form of the new Z590 chipset based ROG Maximus XIII Hero. Even here you get a glimpse of how far technology has come as the Extreme and Formula models sat above the affordable Hero, but as you’ll soon see the thirteenth Maximus board has, in Hero guise, all you could realistically need.
Technical Specifications
The Z590 is an evolution of the Z490 chipset range, rather than a wholesale revamp. The Z490s were still fairly recent, and thus the primary addition to the newest Intel chipset is the PCI Express 4.0 support we all expected to see on those aforementioned Z490s. The Maximus XIII Hero also has Thunderbolt 4 support and, perhaps most excitingly, support for DDR4 up to 5333 MHz. With 4 M.2 slots to handle your storage needs it promises to be a high bandwidth, high performance system for everyone.
Cooling
As you would expect from a product which not only falls under the Republic of Gamers umbrella but also the famous Maximus brand, the Maximus XIII Hero has plenty of fan headers and cooling options to ensure you can run your system at its optimum level of performance.