Asus ROG Crosshair
VIII Hero Wi-Fi
A lot of motherboard, but also a lot of dollars.
I
n years past, a ROG
Hero board would
have been positioned
as one of the value
ROG offerings. The fact
that this is a $649 board
goes to show how
expensive X570 models
can really be. Perhaps we’ll
see an even more
expensive Crosshair
Extreme or Apex board
down the line?
You’d expect such a board
to have a comprehensive
feature list, and it does. 8
pin and 4 pin power
connectors feed a 16 phase
VRM, with each MOSFET
being rated to handle 60
amps. Overclockers
wanting to shove hundreds
of watts through the CPU
won’t face any issue here,
though all the boards
shown here also have
strong VRM solutions. The
Crosshair VII Hero had
beefy heat sinks but those
on the VIII have even more
surface area to cope with
the power demands of anpleased to see the inclusion
of Intel Gigabit and Realtek
2.5G LAN ports too.
Networking has taken a
major and welcome step
forward on X570.
Asus’ ROG UEFI BIOS
remains as comprehensive
as ever. Users familiar with
Asus BIOS will be right at
home, however it can be a
bit overwhelming at times
for inexperienced users. It’s
packed full of options, with
a million things to play
around with.
We expect nothing less
than excellent performance
from every ROG board we
test, and the Asus shows
itself well. We used the
Hero for our Ryzen CPU
review and subsequently
installed the latest
available AGESA 1.0.0.3
BIOS for this test. We got a
small performance uplift in
CPU benchmarks. The gain
was just a percentage point
or two here and there,
within the margin of error
really, but free performanceoverclocked processor. The
RGB implementation is
fairly subtle with just the
chipset and I/O area being
illuminated.
The ROG Hero is the only
board in the test that has
only two M.2 slots.
There’s an isolated heat
sink for a single drive (the
other slot requires
removing part of the
chipset heat sink assembly).
You’ll also see eight SATA
ports for the file hoarders
out there. Overall it’s an
attractive and functional
layout.
The I/O area has an
integrated shield and is
chock full ports. Asus has
equipped the Hero with no
less than 12 USB ports on
the back panel alone with
more possible via internal
headers. Eight are USB 3.2
Gen 2 ports, far more than
any other board in the
roundup. There’s also four
Gen 1 ports. Wi-Fi 6 is set to
become standard at this end
of the market and we’reis always welcome. The
other boards also had the
latest available BIOS
installed.
We came away impressed
with the Crosshair VII Hero.
If you’re a long time ROG
fan, you won’t be
disappointed. It’s got
everything you’d expect to
see included in a ‘mid-tier’
ROG board. It’s still a pricey
proposition though and
that’s its only real
weakness in the face of
the more affordable, yet
similarly spec’d and refined
options from MSI and
Gigabyte.Verdic t
Asus’ Crosshair VIII Hero is a capable
and well equipped offering but it faces
tough price competition.AsusROGCrosshairVIII
HeroWi-Fi;SocketAM4;
uppor tp forAMDRyzeny 2nd
&3rdGenprocessors;p 2x
M.2; 8 xSATA; Uppto 9 xUSB
3 .2Gen2, 6 xUSB 3 .1Gen1,
4xUSB2.0; 8 02.11ax
2.4Gbpps Wi-Fi;IntelI211AT
GandRealtekRTL 8 125-CG
.5GLAN;RealtekALC 1220
7.1ChannelHighg Definition
Audio;ATX Form Factor.th »x 570
$64 9 |WWW.ASUS.COMSuM1 G
2