ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero AMD Ryzen 2 Motherboard review

ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero AMD Ryzen 2 Motherboard review

ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero AMD Ryzen 2 Motherboard review

FORExcellent overclocking experience
Great memory compatibility
Plenty of connectivity and cooling options

AGAINSTExpensive
Looks are a little plain by modern standards.

Specifications

Socket	AM4
Chipset	AMD X470
Form Factor	ATX
Voltage Regulator	10+2 Phases (5 doubled)
Video Ports	✗
USB Ports	10 Gbps: (1) Type-C, (3) Type A5Gb/s: (8) Type AUSB 2.0: (2) Type A
Network Jacks	(1) Gigabit Ethernet, (2) SMA Antenna
Audio Jacks	(5) Analog, (1) Digital Out
Legacy Ports/Jacks	(1) PS/2
Other Ports/Jack	(1) BIOS Flashback, (1) Clear CMOS
PCIe x16	*(2) v3.0 x16/x0 or x8/x8(1) v2.0 x4x8 slot shared with M.2_2*
PCIe x8	✗
PCIe x4	✗
PCIe x1	(2) v2.0
CrossFire/SLI	4x / 4x
DIMM slots	(4) DDR4
M.2 slots	*(1) PCIe v3 x4 / SATA3 42/60/80/110mm(1) PCIe v3 x4 42/60/80mm**
U.2 Ports	✗
SATA Ports	(6) 6Gb/s
USB Headers	(1) USB3.1 Gen2(1) 5Gbps(2) USB2.0
Fan Headers	(8) 4-pin, (1) 3-pin W_FLOW, (2) 2-pin W_IN/OUT
Legacy Interfaces	(1) COM, (1) Speaker
Other Interfaces	(1) Thermal sensor, (2) RGB, (2) Addressable LED, (1) ROG Extension, (1) EXT Fan Header, (1) Front Panel Audio
Diagnostics Panel	Numeric
Internal Button/Switch	(1) Power-ON, (1) Reset, (1) Safe Boot, (1) ReTry, (1) Slow Mode Switch, (1) LN2 Mode
SATA Controllers	Integrated (0/1/10)
Ethernet Controllers	Intel I211AT
Wi-Fi / Bluetooth	Asus Wi-Fi GO! Module (2x2) / Bluetooth 4.2 / 3.0
USB Controllers	ASMedia USB 3.1 Gen 2 Controller
HD Audio Codec	ROG SupremeFX S1220
DDL/DTS Connect	✗ / ✗

I'm just gonna highlight some of the overclocking features that this board has before that this is brought to you by the msi gtx 1080 gaming X and Nvidia's GeForce experience which allows you to retro actively capture key gameplay moments with shadowplay convert captures into gifs with new tools and apply filters to games hashtag no filter Emma sighs gaming axe PCBs are high quality with well-built power management and coolers that we've previously

recommended learn more at the links in the description below on the integrated rear i/o you can find the clear CMOS as well as bios a flash back button it's in this area so you can actually flash your motherboard with no cpu just a just a 24 pin plugged in and it'll flash off of the 5 volts done a standby power of your of your power supply so that's a pretty cool feature

especially handy if you like it can recover from like corrupted bios flashes and so that's that the motherboard does have an 8 pin and a 4 pin for CPU power for those of you unaware the 4 pin is completely optional in fact the way these work you could probably just plug in the 4 pin and not the 8 pin it would be a terrible idea to do that but it would probably turn on but you really do just for daily use as you really do just need the a pin and even only quit nitrogen I wouldn't

be surprised if you were fine with just the 8 pin the the 4 pin really shouldn't make much of a difference under any conditions now then moving along the top edge up in the corner here we find the post code as well as some troubleshooting LEDs under that the post code is of course extremely handy if you're trying to troubleshoot any kind of boot issues because it tells you with pretty good with a pretty good amount of detail what exactly went wrong the LEDs below that

are they're color coded and they're much like they're not as helpful in my opinion but they are a good quick indicator of what is malfunctioning even though the post code will give I'll always give you a you know better amount of detail so you basically just check the goto then check the motherboard manual for what that code means so yeah that that's a postcodes much better than the LEDs but you know it doesn't have hurt to have both and if you're just trying to

quickly figure out what might be wrong than the LEDs are a good first indicator now then under that you find the power button and the reset button so you know one turns your computer on and the other one just resets it so no rocket signs right there you can't see it in this picture but there's a voltage read points right along here they are well here you can see them better so that's the actual voltage read points they are next to the 24 pin which i think is

probably the worst place to put them in terms of accessibility because well it's just kind of hard to get probes from a multimeter under the 24 pin cable that'll be you know plugged into this area the vcore DRAM and SOC voltage read points have an upgrade to them in terms of signal integrity so they're actually differentially routed this time around and that basically means that they'll pick up less noise and they'll be more accurate when you when you try to probe them

and also while we're on the back of the board you can see right here there is a hole in the socket and this is for putting a temperature for putting a thermocouple through four extreme overclockers to basically monitor the temperature of their CPU because CPU the built-in CPU temperature diode it does not work at well basically below minus 20 degrees it is completely useless even below minus five degrees the diodes often just stop working so I'm very very you

know that this is a handy feature though I I as a you know extreme overclock it I can see the point of it I and I can imagine there might be some scenarios in which it could be helpful but generally speaking I've never used it most other people I know of never never ever used it but for those you know for those who want to use it it's there and that definitely doesn't hurt to have it so that another one of these features that the board has now then going down along the

edge you don't really find anything for a while until you get down here and this is my first major complaint for the motherboard don't do this just like that don't don't do this don't put you know two control buttons up here two controls buttons over there and two more and like another bunch of controls down here like that's just it makes it really really hard to sort of have an optimum orientation for the board because like if you're comfortable if you have easy access

to this then you won't have particularly easy access to that or this if you're on a test bench so I well I completely understand why they've done this because this board isn't an ATX so it does actually like Asus for their other for a lot of the other top and ROG boards they're like a bit wider and that's mostly to well that allows you to accommodate holding extra buttons up in the corner here but yeah that this is like this is just not this ruins quality of life when overclocking

and so basically your safe boot button and your retry button are down here the safe boot you press that and if you have bad BOTS like if you're having trouble posting because you've screwed up some settings you hit safe boot you get into the BIOS and all of your settings are still there you've just booted on stock settings that's a really really handy feature for those of us who don't keep good track of saving profiles if you're good at saving profiles the clear CMOS is all you really need but this is way more convenient because you don't need to save profiles and

yeah so that that's a really nice button tap next to that there's the retry button the retry button is for if you have very difficult memory settings you can press the retry button a few times to basically force the motherboard to try retrain the memory settings and well it's a good way to try get hard memory overclocks working it's not exactly like that this isn't something you would use for daily overclocks because restarting your computer like several times to get your memory to post properly it probably means that your memory isn't stable even once it does

post so this is very much for benchmarking purposes and not for daily usage next to that you find the ln2 mode jumper this it kind of varies how much this does depending on the motherboard but under without ln2 mode dips enabled the slow mode switch under that doesn't work but also your BIOS voltage limits aren't aren't as ridiculous as they could be because normally an ROG motherboard has volt bios limit BIOS voltage limits that are

completely unsafe for you know long term usage like you can set like one point six volts to the CPU two volts into your memory one point 4 volts into your SOC like completely ridiculous amounts of voltage are already accessible without the ln2 mode if you go into ln2 mode everything gets bumped up by a couple hundred more milli volts so you go from no particularly safe for use as is - definitely not safe for daily usage at all and arguably not even safe on liquid-nitrogen it like basically unlimited voltage mode more voltage where then you could ever

possibly want below that you do find the slow mode switch which does require the ln2 mode to be enabled to work and what the slow mode switch does is it forces the like if you turn it on it forces the CPU ratio to the lowest possible setting if you turn it off it puts the CPU back up to its current speed so very very handy for extreme overclockers because if you're just sitting in the bowels you don't need to say if you running at 5 gigahertz or 5.5 gigahertz or whatever

whatever you've gotten it to similarly if you're in Windows and just you know setting the things up or making a screen shot or doing any or like you know preparing things there is again no reason to have the CPU running at 5 gigahertz and you can force the CPU to a much lower frequency using the slow mode which a ensures better stability and be it he saves you liquid nitrogen because not running at full speed all the time does mean the CPU doesn't like you're

still going to be a high voltage but the massive drop in frequency does actually significantly lower your power consumption so it also lowers your liquid nitrogen usage so that that's a very very handy feature to have on all extremo like I think this is a must-have for most extreme overclocking motherboards that have a you know high power consumption architecture available to it so you know X 99 X 299 X 399 X 4 70 X 370 all of these should have the slow

mode because these CPUs can idle on a lot of power if you let them and idling on a lot of power is not good for for your temper basically or ln2 usage so that's definitely a nice feature to have and that pretty much covers it in terms of the really obvious stuff that this motherboard has in terms of extreme overclocking features it does also support vclt overclocking though will not cover the details of that here and yeah it does not have a it doesn't have a dual BIOS it is a

single BIOS motherboard as was the previous crosshair Aero board so yeah which personally I prefer having motherboards with dual BIOS but well no I just strain it like it's just better to have a backup bios built into the board that don't have one at all and the other thing is the BIOS chip on this motherboard isn't even socketed so if you have one BIOS chip and if that one BIOS chip fails for whatever reason it pretty much needs to get like removed and replaced by

soldiering not great so yeah that is like the the BIOS flashback function should be able to recover you from like 99 percent of you know various BIOS failures and corruptions but if there's something actually straight up wrong with the chip then the lack of there being a second chip or just the ability to remove it it is is kind of a problem so yeah I I do prefer or like I think for a board in this price category it really should have a second vial so it doesn't really make

sense to just have one especially because BIOS chips aren't exactly expensive and historian and in the past a lot of our og boards had dual BIOS so I don't know why they stopped doing that so much these days anyway let's get into the power delivery system now aces have done some interesting things with the vrm this time well one interesting thing with the VR I'm other than making it just more massive like other than making it massive overkill there's one interesting thing they've done so this right here is your V core and SOC vrm because the way it's actually laid out is kind of funky so that right there is your SOC v RM this is V core right v core and

this down here is also V core and the reason why this is done is because this motherboard does not have any display outputs so there's no good reason to put an APU in it and even if you did put an APU in it you can't actually use the APU GPU to do anything so the SOC vrm on this motherboard will basically not have to do any work because it's never going to be running a you know a apu so asus decided to put the SOC vrm between the V Corps and the other V core for basically thermal purposes because it means that instead of having one big you know halt blob like this you get one halt blob down here and one halt blob down there and overall your

temperature is actually like your your overall thermal density is a bit lower because you have this cold spot in between the two rather than just having one big halt stripe like that so that helps improve vrm temperatures the the actual V RMS themselves for V core you're looking at a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten phase the SOC is a two-phase like that the voltage controller is on the back of the board which is kind of an interesting place to put it most boards have it on the front but I guess since they already had SMDs going on the back of the

board anyway they decided that well just doing more work on the back doesn't doesn't really raise the cost because obviously if you just do one side of the board it's cheaper than doing both so the voltage controller that Asus uses for the V Corps and SOC BRM is this chip right here and it is the ASP 1405 so that is an asus rebranded part from international rectifier it's probably an IR probably an ir35 ir35 2:01 so the same thing you would find on all the other high-end motherboards it might have some special features specifically for Asus but with all probability it's just probably just like it's almost certainly just a straight rebrand here it is

running in a 5 + 2 phase configuration the 2 is for the SOC the 5 runs into a bunch of doublers in this case IR so the dumbest doubler that ir makes because this thing literally just so those are IR and that gives you a 10 phase by the definitely liked by the bare minimum definition of what a 10 phase would be and the reason some somebody pointed out last review that I'm less harsh on these doubling schemes and it's basically because doubled up a doubled

up five phase has more in common with a 10 phase than it has with a 4 phase or a five phase like it is a lot lot better than just a straight 5 phase it but of course having like a 10 phase or even a real 8 phase those might have an advantage over it but it's not comparable to a 5 if it's doubled up into a 10 so literally just takes two the PWM signal from the asp 1405 and cuts the switching frequency in half and puts it into two phases so this thing does have 10 phase interleaving so one phase out of the ten is only ever turned on at the same time which

means you do get all the benefits like you have lower Ripple and you have better thermals on the vrm and better efficiency but the vrm does lack things like current balancing because the IR 3599 is incredibly dumb it doesn't even do the most basic current balancing of like turning off like skipping a phase and it can't do duty cycle extensions which some of the really expensive doublers can do but it does do the bare minimum of that you know you only do have one time one out of the ten phases running at any given time so and your your transient

response is also better than like a comparable five phase so it is as close enough to being a ten phase that I'll go and say it's a ten phase because it doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with the other five like with five phase designs there so that's the control scheme here the SOC is just a straight you know two phase running off of the SP 1405 now if we go back to the front of the board the actual chips making up each phase well the chip making up each phase because it is

one chip these are international rectifier power stages these are ir35 55s the Asus favorite 60 amp power stage these are actually surprisingly cheap apparently like you can get these on digi-key in a reel of three thousand for two point apiece so I'm not sure what's up with that I think they're on like a massive sale because I'd expect these to cost a lot more under normal circumstances but yeah they're currently going for two dollars apiece so they're

cheaper than they normal then then what I'm like I I expected to see them around three to four dollars so yeah but right now these are cheap which kind of explains why Isis decides has been using them so much because this isn't like they've been throwing these on so many boards recently and graphics cards and well it's a 60 amp power stage though the end result is that this is massive overkill for a risin eight core like it's ridiculous how overkill this vrm is so if you're

looking at running so with this VR I'm running at 500 kilohertz switching frequency all in the actual phases so that would be 1 megahertz coming from the controller and 5 volt gate drive for a 8 core like I'm just gonna go with the 1000 series 8 core and the 8000 and the 2000 series 8 core CPUs because well they're the highest current draws that you're gonna see on a am4 motherboard so for the 1000 series at one point for 2 volts you'll be looking at around a

hundred amps and for the 2000 series you're gonna be looking at one point for 2 volts and about 125 amps and with these with this operating configuration for the vrm you're at a hundred amps you're looking at about 12 watts of heat which is very similar to what we saw in the the gigabyte gaming 7 and at 1.4 you know at 125 amps output you're gonna be looking at 13 watts of heat because it's just completely massive overkill this vrm doesn't need a heatsink at

all like the gigabyte one didn't this is even more efficient these components are physically larger this thing will run ice-cold under basically any operating conditions it's massive massive massive overkill and if you write you know if you crank it up to liquid nitrogen which I don't have accurate power figures for liquid nitrogen yet about 1.8 5 volts and I think the CPU might hit 200 amps I'm not 100% certain about that because very low temperatures massively change

how much power as CPU pulls and it by massively change I mean massively reduce the amount of power our CPU poles so I'm not sure if it'll even hit that much current draw it might go even it might go above that it might go below that I'm thinking probably below that but for 1.8 5 volts 200 amps this vrm will only produce about 22 watts of heat which is just like it's it's ice hold like that is still you know spread across this many phases 22 watts of heat is really not

much so yeah that is that this thing is massive overkill it's just absolutely massive overkill then then again that's like with the price tag that this board comes with it makes sense that it would be so yeah very very impressive erm from Asus also for temperature monitoring since people are wondering about that the temperatures in on this vrm are read directly from the IR 3555 is they have a temperature monitoring function built into them so that's how that's taken care of and yeah it that that's like probably that that's one of the most accurate ways to get vrm

temperatures possible directly from the power stages because that temperature sensor is actually built into the silicon that's doing your switching of the that's actually in the same silicon as the MOSFET so it has the least amount of thermal resistance towards the things that are actually getting hot now the SOC vrm is made up of the same 35 55 s so it's it 2 is ridiculous overkill and for a so for about 4 well 1.2 volts 20 amps output which is probably around the max you will see for a CPU risin you're gonna be looking at about 2.2 watts of heat and for 30

amps at 1.2 volts you're gonna be looking at about 2.4 watts of heat there's no point rating this for like SOC current associate current draws of an APU because there's no display output so no good reason to put an APU in this board the SOC VR compass again massive overkill it's just this is kind of the kind of everything like everything about this board really well about this vrm right here is a best described as massive over hill so I yeah I can't come plain here in fact what's kind of interesting about this vrm right here is it's it's technically bigger than what you would

get on some other top-end ROG motherboards on let's say power hungrier platforms so yeah this I'm pretty sure is currently the strongest vrm from ROG that you can get on a motherboard like I don't think they have a board with a stronger vrm than this they do have GPUs that have had stronger VRMs than this but not motherboards so this is actually really close to their top-of-the-line GPUs in terms of in terms of like the vrm design which is uh which just like the the reason why GPU like GPUs get such some so much stronger vrm designs is

because GPUs are like have a stock power consumption of like 250 watts right whereas a CPU at stock is like a hundred and if you overclock a GPU you can easily do as much as double the stock power consumption and on CPUs you can do roughly the same but a CPU going from a hundred to 200 watts is nothing compared to a GPU going from 200 to 400 watts so yeah this really wouldn't look out of place on a 1080 Ti in fact if my memory serves me correctly this is

very very very similar to what the Asus 1080 TI Strix has for its of ecore VRA so yeah this is ridiculous overkill for for horizon 8 core but hey for a price for a motherboard at this price point I mean it'd better be ridiculous overkill so yeah nothing to complain about the actual vrm itself the capacitors around the motherboard so these guys and these are niche econ FP series and you can actually tell that these are FP 10ks so these are rated for oops wrong button these

are FP 10 kHz columns and that 10 K stands for 10,000 hours at 105 degrees centigrade I mean Celsius so and I keep doing that wrong so there so yeah these are basically the only higher rating I've ever seen on a motherboard is 12,000 and honestly if you're not hitting that hundred and five degree figure the time that these capacitors last is like orders of magnitude larger than that that rating at 105 degrees like if you're at 80 they last for ages and ages and ages and ages

so yeah this like you should not be the CPU will probably be obsolete before these kappa capacitors and this vrm hit they're like mean time to failure so yeah nothing nothing nothing in the power sit like in the cpu power section to complain about for the memory power asus has gone with the Asus usual of two-phase memory of erm it's this thing right here and the these MOSFETs so these are discrete fats and these are Nyko semiconductor and yeah this is a really cheap MOSFET manufacturer but the thing about Ram is that it doesn't really pull about

power well pull all that much power so these Nyko PE a 16 VA MOSFETs even if you have four memory sticks pull at one point three five volts pulling two watts each which is actually a bit high for that voltage you know you're gonna be looking at six amps output on this VR I'm max and that'll produce about one watt of heat so that this isn't overheating and asus has been using this for memory vrm design on tons and tons of boards because it works so yeah that covers the memory of your room right there and that covers the actually the entire board I mean you do

get some minor voltage regulators down here but none of those is you know you're not gonna be changing the voltage outputs of any of those so there's really no need to worry about there about about them and yeah that covers the board like my only complaint is that they put the the like they put some of the controls down here and then some of the controls up here I find that absolutely infuriating when a motherboard does that because I use these buttons a lot and

when they're this far apart it really gets you know it starts getting on your nerves after the 50th time you need to go press the safe boot button and it's on the other end of the motherboard which you can't reach but other than that like this board is extremely solid massive amounts of overkill on the vrm it's just yeah it's well it's uh it's it's a pretty heavy upgrade compared to the old crosshair 6 hero actually like you get not only do you get two phases more than before all of

the MOSFETs were actually like just upgraded it went from the Texas Instruments power duel and that's to these International rectifier 35 55 s and that's just another massive upgrade so yeah it really like this this is the strongest vrm that I'm aware of that asus has on on motherboards right now so yeah that should pretty much tell you everything you need to know this thing is massive overkill and they're like there's like as long as the BIOS is good there's not

really any way that this mother I could see this motherboard letting you down physically there's nothing wrong with it .

ASUS ROG Crosshair VII Hero AMD Ryzen 2 Motherboard review

one of the most important aspects when looking at an enthusiast motherboard is going to be the overall look and feel or the board's aesthetics in this regard the crosshair 7 hero is an outstanding board it follows the design trend of previous generations but ups the ante and offers some really distinctive functions and features to really let you define the look and feel of your build first and foremost the board is fully monochromatic that means that there's no fixed colors that can't end or compete with the look and feel of your system you go ahead and find

whatever colors you want and it comes to actually selecting your colors the board features two fixed RGB lighting zones one in the i/o shroud and then another in the PCH area these can be fully controlled through ASIS or a sync now speaking of AC source sync you have a lot of connectivity available T on this board with four total headers two legacy 5050 RGB headers as well as two addressable digital headers now for a lot of the users out there we've had feedback

that they're looking to be able to go ahead and go in the entire opposite direction of RGB lighting and go for more stealth blacked-out look and in this regard the crosshair seven feet hero is going to be the first board that features are integrated stealth mode so through an option that's available in the UEFI you can fully disable every single light that's available to you on this board so if you're looking to really have a fully blacked-out build this is gonna be a

perfect choice for you so with a board like the hero it's not just about the aesthetics or the look and feel you definitely are concerned about overclocking in fact many enthusiasts pick rog series motherboards specifically for their overclocking design and overall capabilities in this respect the crosshair seven hero has really been purpose-built to offer a truly impressive

overclocking experience it features out far more robust vrm than our strict series ports what's going to feature significantly upgraded power component Ares with 10k rated capacitors next fit MOSFETs and advanced power stages in addition to that the heatsink design is very high-end it features a two-stage heatsink with a heat pipe that connects both of them together helping mature extremely good temperature performance either under full loads you're also

gonna have the inclusion of a specialized external clock generator what this will allow you to do is essentially decouple other buses from influencing the CPU frequency many times if these buses are actually all maintained and linked together it can artificially limit the max CPU overclock so with our G Series motherboards and thus external clock generator to be able to decouple them and be able to take your CP overclocking even further and for users that are

course interested in DRAM overclocking rest assured that our G Series boards will continue to offer the absolute best memory overclocking available on the AMD platform , going in hand-in-hand with overclocking is going to be cooling and in this regard the crosshair seven hero really offers tons of specialized design implementations which are really for those enthusiasts that want to take things to the next level in terms of their control and their monitoring so of course you're gonna have all the standard connections you could ask for in terms of support for

standard chassis fans whether they're gonna be three pin or four pin you can fully calibrate them and profile them of course within our operating system be our fan expert for software or of course you can jump into the UEFI and take care of there as well now for those more demanding enthusiasts they want more targeted control you also have temperature input mappings so that you can have your fans respond to either the CPU temperature or the GPU

temperature but where are things I think it really interesting is going to be the more specialized level of connectivity first up for water cooling enthusiasts you're gonna have dedicated options for detecting the actual water flow as well as water temperature Inlet and outlet so this is gonna be great in terms of really seeing how your actual custom water cooling loop is performing in real time in addition to this for enthusiasts that are gonna really have larger builds and they're

gonna have a lot more fans in their system having the ability to have our fan extension card equipped it on this board really is gonna offer you even more fan connection options with three dedicated headers for more fans as well as three additional temperature sources add to this the fact that all of the actual fan headers that are on this board support PWM output mode this will allow you to go ahead and actually use a PWM fan splitter cable on one header but have

three to four fans connected to that one header this is perfect for high-performance radiator configurations front intakes or top fans that are set up in an intake or exhaust configuration in your build we also have to account for MDOT two drives the crosshair seven hero features a high performance specialized MDOT two heatsink design to be able to help you ensure that you get the most stable and cool operation for the highest performing MDOT two drives that are

out on the market when you add this all together you're really talking about the absolute best experience that's possible for cooling your overall system when based on an x4 70 motherboard now equally as important on a motherboard is going to be the overall connectivity that it offers and this respect the crosshair seven hero comes really packed to the gills with tons of actions we've got 14 USB ports and quite a bit of different mix when it comes to these points you've got

USB 3.1 both type a and type C you have full support for USB 3.1 gen2 in terms of an internal header for the latest generation of chassis x' for current generation chassis x' you have a standard front USB 3 header and you're also going to have standard Gigabit Ethernet port and have the latest generation attitude 11 AC dual band Wi-Fi with multi-user - support for those of you are interested can you game on Wi-Fi you definitely can do so especially with this board in

fact with a current high performance router you can expect speeds that are between three to four times faster than a standard 10100 Ethernet cable and with extremely low latency you've also got all the traditional connections you would expect in terms of expansion for storage such as dual m2 but support for PCIe nvme protocol SATA 6g as well as your standard PCIe slots , another special area on the crosshair seven here is going to be the overall audio design

this being an ROG motherboard they definitely the expectations are high but the board definitely delivers it features a very impressive audio design that includes full ROG audio isolation that's fully shielded to help your reducing appearance and it also features audio grade capacitors as well as dedicated operational amplifiers and the inclusion of an ESS saber DAC when you can find these all together you get a couple of really nice benefits regardless of

whether your going to be in music movies or games you're gonna get an improved tonality increase soundstage increased volume levels and you're also gonna have a huge amount of customization options available to you within the sonic studio 3 interface last but not least is gonna be a really special implementation for the audio side which is going to be very beneficial for those of you looking to be able to take your VR immersion to the next level and this is

through the inclusion of our studio link software this one combined with the options are available to you in terms of customizing the overall audio experience within Sonic studio 3 allows you to go ahead and take those optimizations and apply that to your VR headset so this is the first time in terms of motherboards being a bow for this type of tailored audio experience but they're gonna be talking about in your music movies or games as well as in VR now for

many gamers out there networking is gonna be just as important as let's say audio or overclocking on a motherboard and in this respect the crosshair 7 here definitely is going to be offering an impressive level of networking connectivity we've got an Intel integrated Gigabit Ethernet port onboard which also features our land guard design that means you have specialized design implementations which enhance the overall reliability especially from

electrostatic discharge as well as from surges and spikes many users don't realize that you can come and receive actually surges and spikes through your actual Ethernet port that actually can cause downtime to your gaming experience and beyond this you're gonna also be able to post fully control the overall networking experience when it comes to your gaming setup and this can all be easily achieved through the game first for Packer priority software whether it's

optimizing your browser your latest download or course the latest game that you're jumping into you you can easily prioritize to make sure that you get the best connected experience for whatever you're running at hand so bringing it all together I think when you take a look at all the different aspects that we've talked for the crosshair seven hero whether it's gonna be the overall build quality its overclocking capabilities and design the aesthetics the audio and the

networking or of course the extensive functionality when it comes to the cooling and the connectivity for cooling you definitely see that this is going to be an outstanding board especially if you're a true enthusiast and looking to be able to offer the highest level of performance for the latest generation of rides into series processors so if you're really looking to be able to build an awesome gaming system you're definitely only take a closer look at the crosshair seven .

still think we should be getting these on USB a toaster and then you get your manual and then when you delve underneath I've already unboxed this which has been on live on the channel already you do get four USB cables you get a normal RGB extension cable you get an RGB addressable extension cable you get the two screws that you're going to need for your m dot tubes because there's two M naught to s on here this is your antenna for your wireless with a

lengthy cable on it and essentially it's magnetic and it stands up like a bit of a shark so you can put it on the top of the case and then you do get a an SLI bridge should you need it now I'm going to bang all this back in the box because I want to have a good look around the board itself because it is one of the most feature packed boards with the stuff that's actually going on on the board as well it certainly feels the most premium one that I've had in my hands so far so you

can see around the power delivery around the top that's all the the sort of stuff that you'd expect from the rogue boards Asus normally do especially once you do get into the proper vlog stuff the V RMS and everything do kind of kick it in ickle and the normally massively I respect this one is no different you do get an eight and a four pin up at the top but you really don't need to add that extra four pin CPU in it makes no difference it didn't help with our over clocks you

only really gonna need that if you're really really like pushing the envelope and anyone at home on air or walking and won't need that one thing do like on this board oh there are plenty of fan headers like you got three up here so you've got the CPU the CPU optional and then you've got the ìïõ so the a IO will run at a hundred percent keep that in mind if you like adding a fan in to call something down or something or if you do have an IO IO that you want to fit this is where

the pump would go if it's got a normal four pin header you do get RGB normal four pin and for the first time you get a 3 pin addressable on the top of the board as well you got the PCI poster readout here power and a reset button on board then you've got USB 3.1 down here another fan header another fan header here the Asus found extension here yet water cooling zone down here as well so you can have your in and out temps and your flow rate going on down here

another fan header then you've got RGB and then the RGB addressable they then got USB 3 here you've got USB 2 here but this one counts as a USB 2 as well this is your Rock connect button you've got the safe boot and the retry button down here plus a slow mode switch for the you know the big overclock is amongst you out there then you've also got a thermal sensor here you've got another fan header here there's another fan header here as well there was another

thermal probe somewhere I noticed on this and I've forgotten to pick up on it or there's another fan header there as well so there's an awful lot of fans let's go through we got 1 2 3 up there coming down 4 5 6 7 and then 8 so there's a total of 8 for pin pwm fan headers on there there's an awful lot of those going on around the back an absolute plethora of USB 3 going on you've got the BIOS flash back CMOS clear Wi-Fi is on here as well you can buy a version of this without Wi-Fi USB 3.1 gen2 here Gigabit Ethernet gold-plated audio connections and then

you've got your supreme effects stuff going on down here it is kind of behind the shielded section on the board as well so the the actual stuff that you've got on the board is pretty spot-on the only thing I can note is that they haven't done which maybe some of the others have done is that the secondary MDOT - doesn't have a heatsink and I think the reason why they've done that is because they've allowed for a hundred and ten millimeter long one on the bottom rather

than just the 80 which the other manufacturers have done is that I think if they had just gone with the 80 they probably would have had a heatsink on it if you're worried about that though you can get aftermarket heat sinks for about 10 pound so I wouldn't necessarily worry about it too much the other thing that they've said about this heatsink that they've got on above the first PCI Express is rather than it just slowing down the rate in which the SSD warms up which they're saying some of the other manufacturers can do they are saying this can actually drop

your m2 SSD temps by up to 10 degrees we did give it a quick whiz indoors as well and we didn't notice at least the seven degree drop on ours so that's all something to keep in mind layout it's all kind of nice what they have done is to allow for our bigger heat sinks and stuff you'll see that the first PCI Express isn't right at the top this is where the first PCI Express would normally be you can see they've dropped it down to the second one so there's a little bit

more room around the socket it gives a more room up here for fan headers and all that kind of stuff so it's actually all kind of you know they've put some serious thought into it so yes that's the way it looks like I said I personally think it does look really nice but also it's pretty RAM packed with features okie-dokie karaoke so we're gonna go into our testing and it's all going to be kind of part of the conclusion as well but first and foremost straightaway we've got like 20

odd pages of results on the overclocked 3d website if you want to go and have a look and pick the graphs apart I'd say with this one it's probably one that you are going to if you're thinking about buying it and you are thinking about spending the money it is going to be worth going to have a look at the graphs also it's worth paying attention to what I'm just about to talk to you about with the biases I tested the board on the Oh 505 BIOS all of the results were done on oh

five oh five you guys at home are probably not going to get a chance to see that though because it's technically a pre-release one and it's been superseded already so earlier on this morning Amit Lee I tested this a few days ago because there's been an awful lot of work that's had to go into getting all of the boards ready for launch but this morning we had the O 805 BIOS come in now I haven't got enough time to be able to complete we test entire board because that's like

two days work and get it ready in time for NDA but I will cover some points about the boss towards the end so overclocking wise is Asus at the end of the day so I have big expectations from them and they didn't let me down in any monde you know massive way considering we're talking about pre-release stuff most of the CPUs are going to be or most of the board's are going to be sort of aiming for around the 4.2 gigahertz mark on all of the cause if you don't

know why all of the cause is a big thing you need to go and watch my CPU review so the 2600 X and the 2700 X CPU review so you can understand the difference between all cores and the part of the boost so 4.2 gigahertz that was below 1 point 4 volts at one point 375 so it did quite well with the voltage being able to get full point 2 if you want to push past that mark you're looking at around 1.5 1.5 to 5 and this did again manage to get one point sorry four point two seven five

as a manual stable clock we did manage to go even further above 4.4 gigahertz for just a screen shot but it that is just a screen shot that is not stable you would need lots and lots more volts to be able to get that stable and to be honest with you the CPUs are the wouldn't last very long with a word overheat in a heartbeat but it's just part of the quirkiness of the rise in architecture so did really well 34 hundred megahertz memory was really easy as well so it did 3400 megahertz is an absolute breeze and that's something else that they've been pushing through

was the IMC with the the new CPUs because at the end of then you need to remember that the IMC is on the CPU and it's not anything to do with the chipset like it was a few years ago but anyway so that side of it it did really well when we went into the scores though and looked at some of the results some of them were alright some of them weren't necessarily all right so Cinebench for example you can see it didn't you know overclocked it did okay second place to

the msi stock i wouldn't kind of rate at all very much Gaming this is the one where it actually did really well really really well this is the place where it absolutely shines the 3d results that we got on this is like we were using a different graphics card because both the over who are going to start absolutely whizzed past everything else that we did when you move on to something like blender though again it comes back to the what I was saying to you about before and it's kind

of in second place which was something that I wasn't particularly like ready for the MS I had done really well but this is why I said to you about the O 505 and the O 805 biases so there the results that we got there are they are our test results we did run a couple of smidgens through to pick out the ones that really would like bothering me so the Cinebench the blender results and changing the bios looks like they may have got things sorted now I may if I get a chance go back

and retest the the board again but right at this present moment in time there's too much on and I just can't get it and I want to let you know what my thoughts are with it now based on it coming in you know second place it did actually come in second place but the results were actually quite minor when you look at the difference between the two so for argument's sake the you're looking at seven seconds on the 1080p and then you're looking at about twenty

seconds on the the 4k run which 20 seconds yeah that's a fair bit if you have a look at the rest of the graphs it's like they get way way further out so it's not too bad weirdly they come in at around at the same sort of price the MSI and the Asus and I so I definitely have done wonders with their initial kind of launch boards and really with the Asus the only thing that I've got to say about it is when it does come down to it the stuff that they've got on the board so all the extra fan headers and the light in and the design and the quality feel and the stuff that you get

in the box it's kind of night and day the asus is definitely the more what I would say is the more quality product I'd also say kind of hypothetically and I mean speculating that from the BIOS the testing that I have seen with that new bias it is just an early kind of little glitch so it's very unusual for them to have done that but you know at the end of the day I from what I've seen I think it's all going to kind of level out quite well so I may end up having to do the whole flippin

thing again but then again I might just not bother at the end of the day they both come in at around quid they are incredibly close and it's really gonna depend on where your allegiances lie but from at the time of testing and I do mean this is well at the time of testing when I did get them done the MS I did manage to spank the crosshair so maybe what we need to take from this is because it has felt for a little while the Aces has got a little bit to relax with stuff there have been times where I picked up issues in the past and they pretty much were

arguing with me before they actually ended up getting things fixed and maybe things just don't I personally don't think they feel like there's a priority as much anymore well I think what this has shown them is that the little peeps ms:i have just pretty much slapped you with a wet fish and they've caught you with your pants down because your flag Lee that you know flag shipboard leadership board just managed to get spanked in a couple of the well a few most of

the graphs in my review now yeah they could say are yeah but we're gonna fix that with the bias now and that's what the people at home are going to be able to buy but MSI sent me the board and it was ready for me so that I could do my review like this in the same kind of manner that you did so which one do you want to do do I have to retest the MSR in a couple of weeks when they change their BIOS and it makes there's a bit better than yours again I don't really know which way to go end of the day I think it's a good thing because like I said m/s I did do

really well normally I don't mention other brands like this but it's not very often that the the ROC boards get kind of not moved down the graphs quite consistently and that's why I think you should go and have a look on the 83 website I've got a funny feeling I will end up being requested to put to give new BIOS as a look but in the end they is a spanking board I think it's just quite refreshing that didn't top the graphs throughout this one definitely does look Bears

got more fan headers it's it's just a nice aboard aesthetically and feature wise overall when you put the two side-by-side it just made me smile that some of the numbers in the graphs probably weren't as good as they thought they needed to be well I think they needed to be so yes it's I like it when this kind of thing happens it puts a little bit of a smile on my face so yeah maybe a little

bit more kind of polish on it next time Asus but you definitely do need to go away and get things sorted before these really start hitting the retail market and I think also is where we need to make sure that the retail boards have the BIOS updated before they go out to end-users as well so like I said I tested this on oh five oh five and it is oh eight oh five out there so if you do buy board make sure or buy one of these boards make sure that your board is on the newest one

which you should do anyway it's quite easy to do from the website download it you can actually do it through the internet and the BIOS if you're actually worried about it but if you do build a new system with this make sure you update the boss because I have a funny feeling it's gonna unlock quite a bit of extra performance for you without you even really needing to do anything but for now at least this is tiny time Logan with a review that he's probably going to get moaned at quite a lot about out .