Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
A lot of motherboard, but also a lot of dollars.
In 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 an
overclocked 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’re pleased 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 performance is 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.