Asus ROG Crosshair VII Hero
Potent yet pricey.
Traditionally the ROG Hero line of motherboards has been aimed at the mid to high-end gamer. Whether that’s with Intel or AMD, usually you can see these floating around the $400-$500 mark. The current one we’re reviewing? $730 at the time of writing. That’s a lot of cash to drop on a motherboard, and it’s honestly hard for us to swallow. Even taking a step back in time for a moment, on launch the X470 Crosshair VII Hero was $379. Sure, X570 is more complex to produce than previous iterations, and there is PCIe 4.0 to consider, which we’ve been told since the beginning is far more advanced and therefor more expensive to manufacture, but can you really justify a price increase of $350 over the course of a year for what’s advertised as a mid-range product?
Now, there’s no denying that this thing is a well-equipped board. You’ve got memory support for up to 128GB of DDR4 with a maximum frequency of 4,800MHz, two PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots both with integrated heatsinks, eight SATA 6Gb/s ports, support for RAID 0, 1, and 10, an impeccable BIOS as always and a ridiculous amount of rear I/O on top of all that.
It also looks impeccable. Asus really has nailed it with its designs over the years, and despite its perhaps poor first showing when AMD originally debuted its X370 chipset way back in 2017, the company’s team-red offerings have certainly matured since that point. The subtle branding, the diagonally cut lines, the use of color, heatsinks, and armor really help to accentuate the overall look of the board quite dramatically.
As for performance? Well on the whole, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the Crosshair VIII Hero does really well. In Tech ARP’s X264 we saw a figure of 43.3fps, Cinebench R15 hit an impressive 2,172 points, and Fry Render managed to complete in 1:58. Power draw was also fairly well-balanced, with it drawing 59W at idle and 152W under load, with some impressively low overclock figures too – no doubt in part thanks to its 14+2 design.
On the whole this is a very good motherboard. Connectivity is impressive, it has a strong amount of rear I/O, the aesthetics are exemplary, and the performance is in line with what we’d expect from an X570 mobo. However, no matter how you look at it, we just keep falling back to that price point again. Regardless of your thoughts on PCIe 4.0, $730 is just a huge number for this product’s legacy. The Hero has been known as being middle of the road – not medium range, not high end – and to see it’s price climb further up the scale really does make us question what Asus’s ambitions are here. If we’re honest, this should be the Crosshair VIII Code, a non-waterblocked variant of the company’s flagship Formula board, with the former currently absent. Then perhaps apply the Hero name to the ROG Strix Gaming-F, or something along those lines. Is that pedantic? Well yes, it is, but it would certainly eliminate the confusion for the consumer.
ZAK STOREY Good connectivity, strong performance and impressive aesthetics, but the price hike hurts.