ASUS MAXIMUS IX HERO

Small changes, big difference

KABY LAKE has launched, and we’re on our way to being buried by the latest and greatest from the big three motherboard manufacturers. Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte are churning out new iterations faster than we can say “Conway Twitty,” and that’s no bad thing. These boards have been in development for some time, and with the first murmurs heard back at CES 2016, it’s easy to understand why manufacturers are so eager to get their foot in the door, and your money in their pockets.

Here we have the kingpin of Asus’s motherboard arsenal, and a follow-up to one of its best-selling mobos of all time. The Maximus IX Hero is a beauty. Asus has done away with the black and red of its eighth-generation ROG predecessor, opting for a dark black and metallic aesthetic instead. The reason is obvious, and something Asus corrected with the launch of the Maximus VIII Formula: If you have a red motherboard, it’s not going to work well with any color other than red, white, or black. This new aesthetic, combined with the lighting on both the chipset and the rear I/O plate, ensures that you can color-coordinate your system without worry.

Moving on, Asus has included an additional M.2 port below the processor, two more fan headers along the side closest to the 24-pin power, a direct USB 3.1 port on board, and it’s relegated the USB 3.0 front I/O connector to the bottom of the board, as opposed to its usual position cozying up to the 24pin. On top of that, Asus has stripped the Maximus IX Hero of SATA Express ports entirely, and as a result, it’s also lost two of the SATA 3 ports. Considering the damp squib that SATA Express became, we’re not sad to see it go. An interesting change we didn’t expect to witness is the lack of U.2 port, especially as Asus reintroduced the Hero Alpha featuring the U.2 port as standard. Diving into the box, there isn’t even an M.2 to U.2 adapter. This suggests that Asus isn’t putting as much faith in U.2 as it is M.2, which makes sense, especially when you consider just how tightly locked Intel has the U.2 connection standard. And, to be frank, with the likes of Samsung producing some fantastic M.2 drives, with higher capacities and better performance than many of Intel’s best U.2 SSDs, we’re not particularly surprised.

BIOS-wise, the Hero IX is the same familiar affair we’re all used to. Overclocking features remain resolutely identical to Z170, with trademark tools such as Asus Enhanced Ratios, and the ability to adjust the VRM efficiency still remaining inside AI Tweak. The board’s overclocking performance is strong as well, with our chip achieving an impressive 5GHz, with a meager 1.25V on the VCore. VDroop is less than 0.01V, and overall performance is exceedingly similar to our other Asus board.

All in all, this update to the Hero board changes a good deal of aesthetic properties, while removing a lot of the wasted space allocated to older connection standards that just weren’t cutting it anymore. We do wish Asus had included one additional USB 3.0 internal header, but otherwise there’s very little for us to complain about. If you’re thinking of upgrading from Ivy Bridge or Haswell, the Maximus IX Hero, in combination with a Core i5-7600K or above, is a fantastic solution.