Introduction

Today marks the start of our main AMD X870 chipset coverage as we begin reviewing boards using AMD's second round of chipsets on Socket AM5. These boards, of course, support both Ryzen 7000 and the so far slightly ill-fated Ryzen 9000 series, but it's likely they will appeal most to those yet to upgrade to the Socket AM5 platform, rather than offering meaningful upgrades for anyone that's already made the switch. As usual with a new chipset series, we have a bunch of new motherboards inbound and first up is a review of the ASUS ROG crosshair X870E Hero.

There aren't many changes in terms of what X870 brings compared to X670, with greater I/O bandwidth and wider PCIe Gen 5 support being the main takeaways. With X870, USB4 ports and 40 Gbps speeds come as standard and the PCIe Gen 5 lane count rises from eight on X670 to 24 on X870, plus Wi-Fi 7 is included with most models, rather than Wi-Fi 6E. However, aside from Wi-Fi and wider USB4 support, the "Extreme" versions of both chipsets—X670E and X870E—are practically identical when it comes to core features, so the key benefits here for potential upgraders are board-specific features.



The ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero is stunning, as you'd expect for a $700 motherboard with UK readers paying a slightly more reasonable £570, with massive heatsinks for the power delivery and M.2 SSDs and new Polymo Lighting II RGB array on top of the I/O shroud—undoubtedly the board's flagship visual feature. Like other manufacturers this time around, ASUS has fine-tuned its tool-free mechanisms on the board so they're now more extensive and hopefully easier to use. Aesthetics, brand loyalty and price will likely dictate where people point their wallets here, with competing models such as the MSI MPG X870E Carbon Wi-Fi and ASRock X870E Taichi being alternative contenders for your cash, also with solid reputations.

Of course this motherboard, like all 800-series and 600-series chipset boards, will support the upcoming Ryzen 9000 X3D Zen 5 3D V-Cache models when they arrive, but whether you opt for current Ryzen 9000 or a Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000 CPU, the ROG Crosshair X870E Hero with its 18+2+2 power stages and seemingly ample cooling is clearly designed to handle extended workloads with 12 and 16-core parts, as well as lengthy gaming sessions. As well as this, the high price tag of this caliber of board also brings premium features, some of which are already mentioned, but we'll be going into more detail later.

Specifications

Packaging and Contents

Accessories usually start accumulating noticeably with boards in this bracket and some can be useful or at the very least make you feel like you're getting your money's worth. However, there's no PCIe M.2 expansion card here, which was the main accessory of the previous model. That's a logical move though, as the board now has more PCIe Gen 5 compatible M.2 ports and hopefully heatsinks enough to cool them too. Most of the accessory upgrades seem to be on the board itself.


The accessories you do get include a host of adaptors for installing tool-free M.2 clips (M.2 Q-Slide etc.) to cater for M.2 modules that fall outside the usual 2280 form factor, there's a Q-Antenna (quick connect) equipped Wi-Fi aerial, USB flash drive with drivers installed, a bottle-opener and the usual accessories such as SATA cables. More features on the board itself is a good thing, but we can't help feeling a little let down by the lack of exciting accessories in the box, even if it's a slightly childish notion.

The full list of accessories includes:

• 1x Quick start guide
• 1x Antenna
• 4x SATA cables
• 1x USB flash drive (drivers, manual)
• 3x M.2 Q-Slide/Q-Release adaptors
• Bottle opener