Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero X570
The best AM4 motherboard ever made?
The AM4 socket is now in the twilight of its career. Since its debut in September 2016, the AM4 socket has played host to four generations of Ryzen CPUs. X570 is likely to be the last high end AM4 chipset, and that means all of the tweaks, fixes, updates and lessons learned over the years are incorporated. Here for review we have the Asus Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. It’s one of very few X570 boards that were optimised for the Ryzen 5000 series of CPUs. Having spent some time with it, and ignoring the fact that this is only the introduction, we’re happy to say that it may not only be the best X570 board of all, but a contender for the best AM4 motherboard ever made.
The Dark Hero features a now common black theme with just a few splashes of RGB. The VRM has been upgraded with 90a stages, up from 60a of the regular Hero. If you want to overclock your CPU even with ln2, this board will handle it. The heatsinks are weighty and large, and work well at keeping the VRM cool even under punishment.
You get eight SATA ports but only two M.2 slots. That will suit most users but you’ll have to look elsewhere if you must have three M.2 drives. Notably there’s no chipset fan! A third M.2 drive would add too much heat without active cooling.
The rear IO is as good as any board. If we have one wish its that we’d like to see a 10G LAN port. There are no less than eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one of which is Type-C. These are joined by four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports. If you need lots of high-speed USB, this is your board.
Under default operation, most similar motherboards perform within a margin of error of each other. It’s overclocking that sets the Dark Hero apart from other boards. Our 5950X sample was easily capable of benchmarking at 4.5GHz before we ran into cooling limitations. AMD Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) also works well. With this enabled, our sample was still stable at 4.4GHz while leaving lightly threaded boosting intact.
The Dark Hero was happy to run at an Infinity Fabric clock of 2,066MHz, which combined with a 1:1 memory clock resulted in DDR4-4133 with tight timings. That’s not something we’ve been able to achieve with any other X570 board, though we have with B550. The Dark Hero is a tweaker’s delight.
A great motherboard isn’t really easy to quantify a lot of the time. It must have a refined BIOS, offer value for money, a great feature list and a thoughtful layout. Perhaps just as importantly though, it has to work. The Dark Hero has all of this and hardly seemed to resist when pushing for an ever-higher memory or Infinity Fabric clock. And It offers relatively good value for money. With some flagship boards costing well over $1,000, at $799 the Dark Hero is almost a bargain, if it’s possible to call a motherboard that costs eight hundred a bargain! Asus has released many ROG boards. A handful of them are legendary. We wouldn’t bet against the Crosshair VIII Dark Hero joining that list.
The Crosshair VIII Dark Hero may well be the best AM4 motherboard of them all.