Board Layout

The ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero certainly does its best to stand out from the crowd with the huge Polymo Lighting II array on top of the I/O shroud. This can be controlled in software, but out of the box it features an animation effect, scrolling from left to right to mimick an actual display very effectively. There are three ARGB 3-pin 5 V/5 A headers on the PCB, two at the bottom and one above the power button. The M.2 heatsinks are large, especially at the south end of the PCB, to cater for the five M.2 slots, three of which are PCIe Gen 5 compatible.

A backplate covers the entire rear of the PCB except for a large cut-out around the CPU socket area. This should provide extra support and prevent damage occurring during installation where it's otherwise easy to knock components on motherboard standoffs, but the backplate also acts as a heatsink, being attached to the PCB with various thermal pads. It's almost a shame it won't be visible given ASUS has gone to the effort of adding model names, logos and other patterns to it.


As you'd expect you get the usual tools for powering on the board away from your case including an LED POST code display, power and reset buttons with the latter the default assignment for the black FlexKey button.


There are eight 4-pin PWM headers, with all of these except the custom watercooling pump header providing 12 W of power. As usual the AIO pump header is configured to run at full speed out of the box, so you'll want to avoid that one when connecting your case fans, which like the CPU headers are automatically controlled using Q-Fan and adapt to CPU temperature.


There are no additional heatsinks in the box to swap out when using PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, which are supported in the top slot under the large black heatsink as well as the two slots underneath the ROG logo heatsink. At first glance this larger part appears to be separate to the lower black heatsink, but they are in fact one massive heatsink. This isn't ideal for accessing SSDs as it means the lower slots can't be accessed when a graphics card is installed, plus aligning such a huge heatsink with four small screws proved tricky.


We have no complaints about the new tool-free M.2 features though, with the upper heatsink securing and detaching in a matter of seconds, the SSD itself was just as easily secured using ASUS' new M.2 Q-Release, where you simply press the SSD in place and release it using a small latch. We don't doubt that this has added to the price tag, but whether you swap out SSDs regularly or if installation will be a one time thing, this process just got far easier and less fiddly.


There's no physical button release for the graphics card and instead ASUS includes PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim, which allows you to detach the graphics card simply by lifting it from the PCI slot end, which unlocks the usual latch and removes the need to manually release it. This is usually a recipe for disaster and can result in a stuck card, but here, it works great, so long as you securely seat and secure your graphics card of course. The feature is essential as the large heatsink above the slot makes it extremely difficult to get at the slot latch.


The underside of the SSDs are also cooled on the three PCIe Gen 5 slots and as these are obviously backwards compatible with PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, it's definitely worth using these slots for their more elaborate cooling even if you're not ready to jump on the PCIE Gen 5 bandwagon just yet. The upper slot might seem to be the logical place for a PCIe Gen 5 SSD, and it's also the only slot that can be accessed with a graphics card installed, but as we'll see later in the review, it didn't cool our SSD as effectively as the much larger heatsink below. We're surprised ASUS didn't use a larger heatsink here as it's a lot smaller than many of its last generation boards. It's sizeable, but our SSD got a little toasty during our stress test. More on that later. You can also adapt each slot to fit smaller or larger SSDs than the usual 2280 standard using the included M.2 Q-Slide/Q-Release adaptors.


The right side of the board includes two of the more interesting features of the board, which at a quick glance are easy to miss. In addition to four SATA ports, there's a PCIe Gen 4 x4 Slim SAS port should you want to add additional NVMe storage, although anything SAS is normally reserved for high-end and workstation motherboards, so this is perhaps a questionable inclusion here for the majority of gamers.


Secondly, in addition to a Type-C header at the bottom of the board, the usual location for your case front panel Type-C header includes both the header and a 6-pin power connector. This allows support for Quick Charge 4+ and provides additional power from your PSU to offer up to 60 W from your case front panel port, so you could even charge office laptops from this port, or perhaps the ROG Ally X, and it is certainly enough power to max out most smartphones.


The rear I/O panel shares an eye-catching new design that's featured on many premium X870 motherboards we've seen, where four Type-C ports sit side by side. On the ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero, two of these are 40 Gbps USB4 courtesy of an ASMedia ASM4242 controller with the other two being 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2. There's a further six Type-A ports all of which are 10 Gigabit, while audio is provided by ROG SupremeFX branded audio courtesy of a Realtek ALC4082 codec and ESS ES9219 QUAD DAC, with ASUS deciding to go with dual 3.5 mm jacks and optical S/PDIF port.

With Ryzen 7000 onwards offering integrated graphics, we'd expect some sort of output on Socket AM5 boards if only for GPU troubleshooting and this comes in the form of an HDMI 2.1 port, with the USB4 ports offering display out too. A 10 Gb LAN port is still a luxury reserved for the higher echelons of motherboard ranges, so we're left with 2.5 Gbit and 5 Gbit speeds courtesy of Intel and Realtek controllers, which isn't much of a leap if at all compared to previous generations. Other extras on the I/O panel are CMOS clear and USB BIOS FlashBack buttons, which continue to be useful when dealing with AMD Ryzen overclocking and memory shenanigans, as well as potentially buying the board in future with an old BIOS that lacks support for future CPUs.