Asus Crosshair VII Hero Wifi
The hero Asus needs?
We expect nothing less than excellent performance from every ROG board we test - and this is no exception.
Nohigh-end motherboard comparison would be complete without an entry from the Asus ROG series. Now that Ryzen is well and truly shaking up the market, the Crosshair has a lot more eyes upon it.
As you’d expect from any ROG board, the feature list is comprehensive. A single 8-pin power connector is adequate for normal overclocking operations, and Asus has included an extra 4-pin connector if you need the extra juice for chasing some HWbot points.
A few things are apparent when examining the physical layout and design. The RGB implementation is somewhat subtle. Perhaps we have reached ‘peak RGB’ with just the PWM and chipset heatsinks having RGB accents. We’ve also got power and reset buttons on board, a metal heatsink for a single M.2 drive, and beefed up heatsinks to take care of Asus’ typically strong PWM system. It’s an attractive and functional layout.
The I/O area has an integrated shield and is chock full ports. There are no less than twelve USB ports, eight of which are USB 3.0 as well as a pair of USB 2.0 ports. There’s also the now standard Type-A and Type-C USB 3.1 pair. AC Wi-Fi is becoming more and more prevalent and the Asus, like all the other boards in this roundup, has it included as standard. There are the standard six SATA ports and a pair of M.2 slots to take care of storage needs. If we are to nit-pick, perhaps an extra pair of SATA ports would be nice at this price range, as the Asrock Taichi does despite its much cheaper price.
Asus’ ROG UEFI BIOS is little changed from previous generations. Users familiar with Asus BIOS will be right at home, however it can be a bit overwhelming at times for inexperienced users. The usual ROG BIOS refinement is ever present of course. It’s packed full of options, everything from the basics to the esoteric.
We expect nothing less than excellent performance from every ROG board we test, and the Asus acquits itself well. With our test sample’s BIOS, Asus had set the performance to an ‘enhanced XFR’ mode, which relaxes the default power limits and enables better performance. Many other boards also have similar settings though we turned it off to facilitate better comparative performance. In our tests, the Hero wins a couple of tests, and performed particularly well in the AS-SSD storage tests, holding a clear lead over the pack in this demanding SSD test with a Samsung 960 Pro SSD.
Our CPU sample can clock to around 4.3GHz but it is proving difficult to get it fully stable at this speed. None of the tested boards were able to pass Cinebench with all cores loaded at any voltage, though at our proven stable 4.275 Ghz, the Asus was bang on the money.
If you’re a long time member of the Republic of Gamers, you won’t be let down by the Crosshair VII Hero. It’s got everything you’d expect to see included in a ‘mid-tier’ ROG board. It’s just that at this price it needs something extra to set itself apart from the capable and cheaper chasing pack. CHRIS SZEWCZYK