ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Motherboard Review

The ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Gaming Motherboard is the latest enthusiast board from the brand. Created to take full advantage of the Ryzen AM5 Series CPUs, the board has been designed to offer years of service and some advanced features through its industry-leading architecture. The board has been built with a heavy focus on thermals thanks to its larger VRM heatsink. This will ensure your power stages are covered if you want to push the CPU to the next level. The board also includes the latest tech including Wi-Fi 7, PCIe 5.0 and DDR5.

Watch the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Gaming Motherboard video review below

Along with the AMD Ryzen 9900X, I put this latest board to the test to see just how well it performed for your everyday gamer. The board’s 18+2+2 power stages also mean there’s a lot of room for overclocking here if that’s what you’re into.

It is important to note that while the Ryzen 9000 series is the focus for this board, the X870E Hero does support the 8000 and 7000 series which are both AM5 sockets. AMD has already confirmed that future CPUs for the next few years will all use AM5 so you won’t have to run out and buy a new motherboard if you decide to upgrade to whatever CPU is coming our way next year.

Keep in mind that the only limitation you’ll find on this board is when using the Ryzen 8000 Series. You won’t use the full potential of the PCIe 5.0 slot and NVMe 5 SSD slot. That’s because the 8000 Series chips don’t have this built-in. It isn’t a limitation on the board’s side.

In terms of specs, this ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Gaming Motherboard comes with 5 M.2 Slots which include 3 x PCIe 5 and 2 x PCIe 4 slots. There’s support for up to 192GB of RAM through the DDR5 DIMM slots and you can install two PCIe 5.0 x16 components.

ASUS has incorporated a new Nitropath DRAM technology into this board. Essentially, this means the RAM slots now feature shorter pins that bend inwards. These so-called 39% shorter pins promise frequency up to 400 MT/s higher than non-Nitropath boards. The shorter pins reduce the interference on the RAM. You can’t really see these pins from the outside. The slots look like your usual DDR5 RAM slots but the tech is there.

You’ll find heatsinks all over this board. The IO cover is fully integrated into the VRM heatsink to extend the heat dissipation across the top of the board. There’s also a new tool-less M.2 heatsink that simply clips on and off the SSD slot when removed. You can even do this with one hand, it is pretty impressive. ASUS calls this the M.2 Q-Slider. The remainder of the board then includes more heatsinks for your M.2 slots.

ASUS has slapped a lot of style on the board here too. The heatsinks themselves feature a curved edge design. There’s a giant ROG logo that looks sort of 3D on the M.2 slots and the IO cover features what ASUS says is Polymo Lighting II. It looks like some sort of futuristic skyscraper advert that flashes as you pass it in your flying car.

In terms of ports, the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Gaming Motherboard is loaded. The IO includes 1 HDMI 1.0 port, 2 x USB4 40Gbps ports, 6 USB Type-A 10Gbps ports and 2 USB-C 10Gbps ports. There’s a dual LAN port layout which includes a 5GB port and an Intel 2.5Gb port. The Wi-Fi 7 antenna joints are also on the back and you’ll also find the Optical S/PDIF Out port alongside 2 x Gold-Plated Audio Jacks. Speaking of audio, it also supports ROG SupremeFX Dolby Atmos.

On the inside, the board includes 2 USB C 20Gbps headers, 4 SATA 6Gbps ports and a Slim SAS Connector. For cooling, you’re looking at 6 x 4-pin fan headers, four temperature sources and one all-in-one pump header.

ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero Gaming Motherboard Set-Up

Considering the X870E doesn’t have any major design changes, setting it up is quite simple. I did unbox the unit first.

Unboxing the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E, it comes with a range of things that will help install the board in your PC along with things you probably don’t need. A bottle opener is one thing. ASUS wants to be in your body and soul by the look of things and every time you pop open a beer, you need to think about the brand too for some reason.

Regardless, the box includes a collector’s card, the motherboard, some ASUS stickers and a user manual along with other bags of accessories. These bags include connectors and adapters for the board. You’ll also get the antenna which includes a new connector that clips on and off the sockets. ASUS has included everything you need here to set up the board.

Installing the CPU was easy. I love installing AMD CPUs because the sockets are so much easier to mount onto the board than Intel. The fact there’s no rear attachment makes life a lot easier.

I then installed the RAM. For this build, Kingston sent over 64GB of DDR5 6400 RAM in a set of 4 sticks. They also sent over a 2TB M.2 Gen 4 SSD which I desperately needed. I usually have a pile of extra PC components around but never enough SSDs so thanks to Kingston for the drop.

I then attached the board to my test bench, connected the cooler and got it up and running. I immediately updated the BIOS before anything else. I installed a new version of Windows 11 and downloaded all the ASUS software and drivers. It was all quite a smooth process.

You would want the ASUS software installed because it will let you monitor the board’s headers while also utilizing the AI features that ASUS has included for overclocking and tweaking. Although, many of these tweaks, and some hidden ones, can be found in the BIOS.

In the BIOS, I wanted to fiddle with some of the switches that would unlock a bit more performance on the board. Given the Ryzen 9900 Series, it offered the best opportunity to test out the chip. Dynamic OC Switcher lets me use the AMD Precision Boost Overdrive dynamically based on the CPU voltage and temperature.

Core Flex is another handy setting where you can control the overclocking limits for certain applications. Here, I could increase the base clock for lighter CPU loads and set higher thresholds for the CPU based on the temperature and PC load. There’s a lot of freedom here to manipulate the power, current and temperature limits. The per-application setting also means users can define their own settings.

Of course, there’s also AI Overclocking. This isn’t really new but it is the easiest way to get more performance out of the board and CPU by automatically detecting the limits based on power and temperature. The system works with AMD Precision Boost Overdrive and the Dynamic OC Switcher to use the most ideal settings on single and multi-threaded workloads.

I ran some benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 9900X untouched. This means I didn’t enable any auto overclocking features and tweaks. I also left the cooler and fans on balance while enabling Performance Mode on Windows.

ASUS ROG Crosshairs X870E Hero Benchmarks

During the tests, the AMD Ryzen 9900X reached a peak of 63C. The motherboard peaked at 32C.  The CPU package hit 48C. VRM temperatures peaked at 40C after 15 minutes of stress tests. Power consumption then reached 165W during multi-core tests and 65W during single-core tests. The CPU hit 5.6GHz fairly easily without any sign of thermal issues. This all resulted in some decent test scores around all the benchmarks I ran.

I stressed the CPU for 15 minutes and the board handled the heat fairly well. VRM temperatures reached 42C while the CPU hit 70C.

I then dived into the overclocking tools. ASUS includes a number of easy overclocking settings you can quickly enable in the BIOS and armoury crate. AI Overclocking is one of them and once enabled in Armoury Crate, it automatically turns on Precision Boost Overdrive and Dynamic OC Switcher.

Keep in mind that this CPU already comes overclocked out of the box. There’s very little headroom for extreme overclocking nowadays and to be honest, it’s all unnecessary if you’re just a general PC user and want to play games and render workloads. But the settings available do let you squeeze a bit more power out of your build without worrying about extreme changes.

Here are the results I got from the CPU after enabling auto overclocking. Keep in mind that your performance may change over time as the board learns your system and cooling potential.

Compared to overclocking off, the CPU power draw rose to 175W during multi-core tests. VRM temperatures rose to 43C and the motherboard temperature rose to 35C. The CPU peaked at 70C. So there was an obvious spike in heat across all sensors. However, these were still impressively low for the tests while at the same time, the pump and cooling were on balanced so this could be reduced by increasing the cooling. You can see the change in score on the multi-core side. There isn’t much change in single-core, however.

I also wanted to test the RAM speeds because ASUS has this fancy new RAM tech on this board. The test was done without any further tweaking to the RAM. So out of the box.

The ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E is a great board with some fantastic heat management and power options. This is a board for enthusiasts who will spend a lot of time fiddling with profiles and overclocking RAM and CPU above and beyond the usual scenarios. You can likely get the same performance and features from other boards by other brands and you’re definitely paying the ASUS ROG tax here. However, it delivers exceptional performance and a high-end experience that you’ll expect from it.

The Gigabyte X870 AORUS Elite is available in South Africa for R11,999. Visit the official site to find out more about the board. Visit Wootware to pick it up.