Thursday, February 2nd 2017
ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero Flagship Motherboard Detailed
Crosshair is the brand that kicked off ASUS' coveted Republic of Gamers (ROG) series. The NVIDIA nForce chipset based ROG Crosshair socket AM2 motherboard was the board to have, in AMD's hayday as the leader in CPU performance. Over the years, the Crosshair brand received lesser love from ASUS, as AMD's chipset releases became infrequent, due to the company's slower CPU product development cycle than Intel. With the new socket AM4 platform and its companion AMD X370 chipset for the high-end segment, ASUS is back with a Crosshair branded motherboard, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero. It's interesting that ASUS chose not to give it the "Formula," "Extreme" or "Apex" extensions, and instead with the "Hero" extension it reserves for the $200-230 ROG branded boards.
Nevertheless, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero looks to be one of the most elaborately designed socket AM4 motherboards, and will compete with the likes of the Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 and the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium. Built in the ATX form-factor, the Crosshair VI Hero draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX power connectors, and conditions it for the CPU with a 12-phase VRM. The board features a "monochromatic design," so you can deck it up with your own LED lighting. It does feature RGB LED headers, with support for ASUS Aura Sync platform. The board has its own diagnostic LEDs that guide you through the POST sequence. Besides the ROG stylized chipset and CPU VRM heatsinks, the board features plastic I/O shield covers that run the length of the board.
The AM4 socket is wired to four DDR4 DIMM slots, which support up to 64 GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory; and two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 when both are populated). The third x16 slot is electrical gen 3.0 x4, and wired to the chipset. Both primary x16 slots feature metal-reinforcements that minimize PCB bending. Storage connectivity include eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and one 32 Gb/s M.2 slot with NVMe boot support. The board is packed to the brim with USB connectivity, including 12 USB 3.0 ports (eight on the rear panel, four by headers), and four USB 3.1 ports (two on the rear panel, including a type-C port; two via headers).
Networking connectivity includes 802.11ac WLAN, Bluetooth 4.0, gigabit Ethernet driven by an Intel-made controller. The board features ASUS' highest grade onboard audio solution, featuring an ESS 9023P DAC, RC4580 buffer chip, a high-precision clock-generator, a de-pop circuit, Nichicon Muse audio-grade capacitors, ground-layer isolation, and EMI shielding over the key components.
Nevertheless, the ROG Crosshair VI Hero looks to be one of the most elaborately designed socket AM4 motherboards, and will compete with the likes of the Aorus AX370 Gaming 5 and the MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium. Built in the ATX form-factor, the Crosshair VI Hero draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPS, and 4-pin ATX power connectors, and conditions it for the CPU with a 12-phase VRM. The board features a "monochromatic design," so you can deck it up with your own LED lighting. It does feature RGB LED headers, with support for ASUS Aura Sync platform. The board has its own diagnostic LEDs that guide you through the POST sequence. Besides the ROG stylized chipset and CPU VRM heatsinks, the board features plastic I/O shield covers that run the length of the board.
68 Comments on ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero Flagship Motherboard Detailed
Me likey!
But - BUT - the fact there's no single DVI/HDMI/DP out on rear panel, but rather loads of USB outs, yeah, me like. :) But i'd still paint the silver/grey VRM heatsinks shields red, dangit ASUS. Still looks beefy. :)
These 370 boards are closer to h110/b150 than z170/270 in terms of pci-e lanes, i hope theres a 390 chipset in the works
Being a storage guy, I wonder about AMD's implementation of SATA3 and M.2. AMD's previous SATA3 offerings always performed slower (mostly because of drivers) than Intel counterparts especially at QD1 4k. Will these SATA3 be competitive or at least offer better driver support? And will the M.2 slot work like Intel or will it follow the same path and offer 85%?
I am more concerned by what appears to be very few lanes provided by the chipset, i see the msi titanium board has 2 m.2 slots and a u.2, but only 1 m2 is labelled ultra m.2, and the u.2 could well be shared with an m.2, as it has been on a few z170's and x99's
Hell where is the Sabertooth? The 990FX R2.0 I have got this 8350 CPU to 5.0GHz and ram at 2400 with 10-10-12-20-20 1T timings at 1.7 (haven't undervolted it yet).
For some of us, this is the obligatory choice for Ryzen
The chipset is'nt no longer on motherboards, but housing inside the CPU. So a cherry picked AM4 cpu will be proberly the best possible OC'er compared to the cheap CPU's AMD has to offer.
I really like the design. As long as it's capable of pushing lots of watts for a rough OC then i'm happy.
All the gamers I associate with have un-used PCI-e, most have 1 filled, a few have 2 filled. This has been the case for a LOOOONNNGGG time, one would think there were better ways to fill this real estate.
The new chipsets are made by Asmedia, not AMD. So SATA performance isn't likely to be Intel level, as Asmedia only have so so SATA controllers. The chipset is thus also using their USB 3.0/3.1 controller and the PCI Express lanes would be based on Asmedia tech. If this is going to give good performance or not, I don't know.
It's obvious that AMD has gone down the Intel route with Ryzen, i.e. they've reduced the PCI Express lane count in the CPU. Why? Because it takes up a lot of space on the die and this way they can save some die space, make a cheaper chip and still appeal to 90% of the market. Not that many people run two graphics cards and as tested by TPU and many others x8 PIE 3.0 is as fast as x16 PCIe 2.0, so it's not as if anything is lost for 99% of games, as so far, no GPU can fully load the PCIe bus, but that might change soon.
You can't magically add PCIe lanes that aren't there. The various splitters/bridges seem to work well enough, but they add a lot of cost and generally don't make sense due to that.
Now, people will flame them and tell them their faults, but the collateral is that the next person doing research sees this trash talk while doing a quick Google search and says na, I'll stay away from that. A self inflicted wound that could have been avoided.
This is why I think it's better to just make a solid performing, and slightly more targeted product if your already in this end of the market. Something else could be substituted or beefed up in lieu of having 2 very limited PCIe.
Obviously there are other overlaying issues with the example argument I used above, but I would wager it is a situation most if not all here have seen in the past.
It will be interesting to see how that works in the real world, e.g. doing PCI-e scaling tests with Vega based products.