Asus rog crosshair viii hero wi

After seeing the good performance offered by the new AMD Ryzen 7 and AMD Ryzen 9 processors, it is time to introduce you to the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi with a total of 16 power phases, a brutal design and a BIOS that is one of the strongest on the market. At least it's one of my favorite models in this new X570 series.

Will the Asus Crosshair Hero X570 live up to expectations ? Well do not miss our analysis, we tell you everything.

But before we start, we thank Asus for giving us this product for our analysis.

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi technical characteristics

Unboxing

The Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi did not wait for the new generation of AMD Ryzen 3000 processors. Asus showed us a great preview of what will be the second most powerful motherboard of the brand for this platform at Computex 2019.

As always, the Unboxing of the motherboards are quite entertaining, because they bring a lot of accessories. Asus has maintained its usual presentation with a rigid cardboard box with dimensions of 367 x 317 x 110 mm with the exterior completely printed in black and red.

In practically all places they are accompanied by photographs of the motherboard and with diagrams of relevant information for the user of the main novelties of this marvel of engineering.

When we open this box on its main face, we have a PCB tucked inside the typical antistatic plastic bag and completely surrounded by a cardboard mold that separates the board itself from other accessories, located one level below. Do you want to see what it brings? Well come on:

• Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi DVD motherboard with drivers and software2 Wi-Fi antennas1x SATA 6Gb / s 4-in-1Q-Connector cable for the motherboard F-Pannel Screws for attaching M.2 SSDs Cables to connect RGB and A strips -RGB Some other merchandising with coasters, stickers and a coupon for Cablemod User Instruction Guide

You cannot complain about so many accessories available, and some useful cables to expand our LED lighting and storage. Curiously, it does not bring a SLI cable for Nvidia cards, but we are not going to complain about it either. By the way, the plate of the port panel is already pre-installed on the motherboard itself, do not worry about it.

Design and Specifications

The design of Asus' high-end motherboards increasingly tends to cover large areas of the PCB through heatsinks and aluminum plates with a great design as in this case. It is a trend that was revealed at its highest level with the Maximus XI Formula and Chrosshair VIII Formula, and in this Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi the truth is that we have a very similar appearance, something that we certainly liked. a lot.

It is no longer about simple PCBs with circuits, but to see who makes the best design, and we must recognize that Asus stands out in this field. With XL-size aluminum heatsinks for the massive VRM, full-left protection for the I / O panel area and sound card, and of course a great heatsink, this time with a fan for the powerful chipset and two M-slots.2 for SSD.

And being a ROG product, you could not miss a complete Asus AURA RGB lighting system. An Asus logo in the chipset zone and a band on the I / O panel case that projects into the "HERO" logo. So Asus is enjoying this of implementing lighting effects by projection, as we saw for example in its ROG Strix Helios chassis.

The rear area is kept bare of protective blackplates, and we only see the fasteners of the heatsinks in the visible area. Of course, the entire area is covered and protected by a layer of special black paint to preserve the safety of the electricity tracks that circulate through this part. We also see the bracket that is responsible for holding the entire system of the AM4 socket on this board.

And as is evident, we are facing a configuration in standard ATX format with the most common measurements, 305 mm high, 244 mm wide and in this case, 55 mm high if we measure the highest area of ​​the plate. In principle, we should not have installation problems in any ATX tower, but there are very tight models with their rear fan that do not allow to put plates with protector on the I / O panel, so be sure to measure the available gap in your chassis.

VRM and enhanced power phases on Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi

One of the characteristics that greatly influence the quality of a motherboard is its power supply for memory and especially Vcore or processor voltage. Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi has no less than 16 power phases. Without a doubt one of the great changes that the new generation of Ryzen 3000 has brought with it is that manufacturers have had to drastically increase the power input of the plates.

And that's not precisely because they are CPUs with a high TDP, since the most powerful ones like the Ryzen 9 3950X have a TDP of 105W. Rather, it is a question of providing a very high quality in the power signal, obtaining a ripple as small as possible in direct current and a “highway” as extensive as possible so that no voltage or current peaks occur. These CPUs with 7nm transistors are highly sensitive, the smaller the more quality they need and this is the result.

This system supports an intensity range from 75A to 200A without any problem, thanks to high-quality synchronous MOSFETs and CHOKES with 16 PowlRstage IR3555 DC-DC converters managed by a synchronous buck gate IC controller. Each of these converters is accompanied by an alloy choke to withstand 45A. It supports an input voltage between 4.5V and 15V and an output of 0.25V to 3.3V at a maximum of 60A with a switching frequency of 1MHz. In the final stage we have Japanese 10K capacitors made of solid polymer.

This VRM will draw power from a power supply system with two EPS connectors, one 8-pin and the other 4-pin, and the traditional one connects 24-pin ATX for general power supply to the board. We see that Asus has renewed its entire voltage control system to create a board that supports high overclocking sessions in these new Ryzen processors that, of course, are unlocked.

Socket and RAM

Right next to the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi VRM, we have the AM4 socket, which has remained unchanged in this new generation of processors. This is good news from a compatibility point of view, since on these new boards we can also install 2nd generation AMD Ryzen processors and 1st and 2nd generation APUs with Radeon Vega graphics. We do not yet have an official list of supported processors, but it will soon be available in the "support" section of the motherboard specification sheet.

As for the capacity of RAM memory, new branches of options open depending on the CPUs that we are going to install on the board due to the compatibility with different generations. What does not vary is the number of slots, 4 DDR4 DIMMs this time without metal reinforcement on their sides.

For 3rd generation Ryzen we have a support of 128 GB DDR4 up to 4600 MHz + OC. in Dual Channel, being the "official" capacity of the 3200 MHz CPUs. So the custom JEDEC profiles of the modules will do the rest of the work. If we go down a step to the 2nd gen Ryzen. We will be able to install 64 GB DDR-3600 MHz, while the 1st and 2nd gen APU processors . support 64 GB DDR4-3200 MHz. All this under Non-ECC type memories.

AMD X570 chipset

And if we talk about a new platform for this Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero, well, we must talk about a new chipset, and the AMD X570 is one of the most powerful built. Perhaps for this reason the manufacturer has decided to finally take the step of building a top range with AMD at its heart as is the Formula, because some of these CPUs give a much higher power than a whole Core i9-9900K.

As for the chipset, it has a capacity of 20 PCIe 4.0 lanes, which give twice the bandwidth than version 3.0, that is. 2, 000 MB / s upload and 2, 000 MB / s download. In fact, this bus is going to be used from now on with SSD storage drives that exceed 5000 MB / s, almost nothing friends. And is that one of the great novelties of the chipset is that it is now capable of handling PCIe and USB 3.1 Gen2 lines without any problem. Throughout this review we will see how the connectivity of the board is going to be distributed. Communication between CPU and Chipset is done through four of these PCIe lanes.

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi: Storage and PCI slots

In this section we must also attend to the type of processor or generation, rather, that we have installed on the motherboard, since the benefits will vary substantially.

Let's start by explaining everything about the PCIe slots that we have available in Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi, which, if we read on, will be a configuration exactly like that of its older sister Crosshair Formula. We have a total of 3 PCIe 4.0 x16 slots and one PCIe 4.0 x1 slot. Of these, only two of them are reinforced with steel, so we can distinguish them from the others to see how they work:

• The two reinforced slots are connected to the PCI rails of the CPU, so they will be able to work in 4.0 x16 or x8 / x8 mode with the 16 Lanes available in the 3rd Ryzen.The two commented ones will work exactly the same under 2nd generation Ryzen, but in 3.0 mode. For APUs, only the first one will work on x8 also in 3.0 mode. The chipset takes care of the other two PCIe slots without reinforcement through 5 PCIe 4.0 lanes. The PCIe x16 slot will run at x4 in 4.0 mode and the PCI x1 will use the remaining lane.

We have multiGPU support for AMD CrossFireX 3-way and Nvidia SLI 2-way in Ryzen's 2nd and 3rd generation, and only AMD CrossFireX 2-way for 1st and 2nd generation APUs. It's certainly a bit of a mess, but we'll have to get used to this on the new boards.

Now we go to see the storage configuration, which will be a little easier than the previous one. We have an M.2 slot connected to the CPU, which supports PCIe 4.0 x4 (or 3.0 x4 in 2nd generation) and SATA 6 Gbps for sizes 2242, 2260 and 2280. And connected to the X570 chipset, we have 8 SATA 6 Gbps ports and another M.2 PCIe 4.0 x4 or SATA 6 Gbps slot supporting 2242, 2260, 2280 and 22110 sizes. The two holes for installing M.2 SSDs have the built-in heatsink and their own pre-installed thermal pads and well protected by a layer of plastic

Network connectivity and sound card

Now we go to see the most peripheral elements of this Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi, we talk about its network connectivity and sound card, in which we have important improvements that we were looking forward to.

Network connectivity, as the name implies, is available both wired and wireless. In the first, we have two RJ-45 Base-T connectors, controlled, one of them using a Realtek RTL8125-CG that offers a bandwidth of 2500 Mb / s and the other using an Intel I211-AT providing 1000 Mb / s. Both are compatible with Anti-Surge LANGuard and ROG GameFisrt, the brand's gaming-oriented technologies. It is appreciated that many of the new boards already offer dual LAN connectivity in their panels.

And surely the most significant step is in Wi-Fi connectivity, since at last we have implemented the Wi-Fi 6 or IEEE 802.11ax standard thanks to an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX200 M.2 card. This means that 2 × 2 MU-MIMO connections now increase bandwidth by 5 GHz to 2400 Mb / s and by 2.4 GHz to 574 Mb / s. So we will obtain a speed almost higher than its wired connectivity, and in addition to almost non-existent latencies judging by the tests we have already carried out on routers under this network protocol. You can not miss the connectivity through Bluetooht 5.0.

And in the sound section we have the highest driver available, a Realtek S1220 codec with 8-channel ROG SupremeFX technology in Hi-Fi, supporting 120 dB SNR on output and 113 dB SNR on audio input. The system is completed with a high-quality SABER ESS ES9023P DAC, which despite not being the manufacturer's most powerful model, will give us extraordinary sound quality with 2Vrms and 24 bits.

I / O ports and internal connections

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi has three on-board buttons, for the power on, reset and safe start mode of the motherboard, and also with the respective Debug LED panel to inform BIOS events to the user.

Now we proceed to deal with the connections available on the rear I / O panel:

• Clear CMOS button BIOS Flashback button 2x Wi-Fi antenna connectors 2x 27x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A ports (red) 1x USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C4x USB 3.1 Gen1 Type-A ports (blue) 2x RJ-45 for LAN connection audio S / PDIF5x 3.5mm jack for audio

As expected, no trace of video connectors on this outer panel, something very normal due to the compatibility it offers with Ryzen processors that are not APU. It is interesting to know that 4 of the USB 3.1 Gen2 are connected to the CPU lanes, while 4 USB 3.1 Gen2, Type-C included, and 4 3.1 Gen1 ports are connected directly to the chipset.

Now we are going to review the internal connectors, something very important for the possibilities of expansion of ports and cooling and lighting:

• 4x Aura RGB Headers (two 4-pin RGB and two three-pin ARGB) 2x connectors for 4 external USB 2.0 1x USB 3.1 Gen 21x USB 1 Gen 1 connector for two ports 1x connector for external audio panel 1x connector TPM Asus NODE connector 8x connectors for fans and cooling pumps 1 x 2-pin W_IN header 1 x 2-pin W_OUT header 1 x 3-pin W_FLOW header

Again it will be interesting to know that all the connectors related to external USB ports are connected to the X570 chipset. Similarly, RGB headers are compatible with Asus AURA Sync and fan headers with Fan Expert 4 to manage them.

testing bench

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	AMD Ryzen 9 3900x
Base plate:	Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi
Memory:	16GB G.Skill Trident Z RGB Royal DDR4 3600MHz
Heatsink	Stock
HDD	Corsair MP500 + NVME PCI Express 4.0
Graphic card	Nvidia RTX 2060 Founders Edition
Power supply	Corsair AX860i.

This time we will also use our second test bench, although of course with AMD Ryzen 9 3900X CPU, 3600 MHz memories and a dual NVME SSD. Being one of them PCI Express 4.0.

BIOS

If you have ever read my reviews you know that I really like the ASUS BIOS. They are very complete, offer exceptional performance and we can both monitor, adjust voltages, overclock at the highest level and the compatibility with the memories in AMD are excellent.

The interface is identical to that of a few years ago. We think it takes a little facelift and use something more avant-garde. This and the null possibility of overclocking (AMD thing) are its improvements, but nothing important.

Overclocking and temperatures

At no time have we been able to upload the processor at a faster speed than what it offers in stock, it is something that we have already discussed in the review of the processors. Although we want to give proof, nevertheless we have decided to do a 12 hour test with Prime95 to test the feeding phases.

VRM at rest

VRM after 12 hours at FULL

For this we have used our Flir One PRO thermal camera to measure the VRM, we have also collected multiple measurements of average temperature with the stock CPU both with and without stress. We leave you the table:

Temperature	Relaxed Stock	Full Stock
Asus Crosshair VIII Hero	31 ºC	37 ºC

Final words and conclusion about Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi

The Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi has not disappointed us in any way. It has left us with a very good taste in the mouth in all sections: design, components, performance and dissipation.

Its new 16 feeding phases and how it manages energy is 10. It offers us a clean signal and temperatures of less than 40 degrees at maximum load. What a treat! Along with the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and an Nvidia RTX 2060 graphics card we find a lethal combination to play in Full HD and WQHD resolution. It is an ideal combination for those users who work and play.

We find the incorporation of a 2.5G LAN connection, a supplementary Gigabit and an 802.11 AX wireless connection very interesting , which will be the new standard par excellence in networks in the coming years. A motherboard of 10!

We recommend reading the best motherboards on the market

We didn't like that the fan of the x570 chipset reaches a very high revolution when we start the computer, but it only lasts a few seconds (don't panic!). It has also happened to us with other motherboards from other manufacturers but we believe that this should be corrected as soon as possible, because it makes a very annoying noise.

As we had already commented at the beginning of the article, the BIOS offers a great solidity to the system and they are always updating new BIOS with stability improvements. In short, we can affirm that if you are looking for a high-end motherboard, without a very high price, the Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi is one of the best options that we can buy right now. What do you think of this new Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi? Is it among your chosen ones?

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ DESIGN	- NO REVIEW
+ FEEDING PHASES	- FAN WHEN BEGINNING POST GETS CRAZY, BUT THEN ENTERS SEMI-PASSIVE MODE.
+ BRING WIFI 802.11 AX
+ STABLE BIOS
+ SOUND, NETWORK AND IMPROVED CONNECTIVITY

The Professional Review team awards him the platinum medal:

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi

COMPONENTS - 95%

REFRIGERATION - 90%

BIOS - 90%

EXTRAS - 90%

PRICE - 88%

91%