ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) Z390 Gaming Motherboard LGA1151 review

ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) Z390 Gaming Motherboard LGA1151 review

ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) Z390 Gaming Motherboard LGA1151 review

FOR
Great Overclocking
Class-leading efficiency
Asus-exclusive extra-value features

AGAINST
Comparative pricing disadvantage.

Specifications

Socket	LGA 1151
Chipset	Intel Z390
Form Factor	ATX
Voltage Regulator	10 Phases
Video Ports	DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 1.4b
USB Ports	10 Gbps: (1) Type-C, (3) Type A5Gb/s: (2) Type A; (2) USB 2.0
Network Jacks	Gigabit Ethernet, (2) Wi-Fi Antenna
Audio Jacks	(5) Analog, (1) Digital Out
Legacy Ports/Jacks	(1) PS/2
Other Ports/Jack	CLR_CMOS, BIOS Flashback Buttons
PCIe x16	*(3) v3.0 ( x16/x0/x2, x8/x8/x2, x8/x8/x4) (Two lanes shared w/SATA 5-6)*
PCIe x8	✗
PCIe x4	✗
PCIe x1	(3) v3.0
CrossFire/SLI	3x / 2x
DIMM slots	(4) DDR4
M.2 slots	*(1) PCIe 3.0 x4 / SATA, (1) PCIe 3.0 x4 (Consumes SATA port 2)*
U.2 Ports	✗
SATA Ports	(6) 6Gb/s (Port 2 shared w/SATA M.2, 5-6 w/PCIe x16-3)
USB Headers	*(1) 10Gb/s Type-C, (2) v3.0, (2) v2.0 (Consumes PCIe x1 slots 2/4)**
Fan Headers	(8) 4-Pin, (1) 3-pin Pump, (1) Asus Fan Extension Card
Legacy Interfaces	System (Beep-code) Speaker
Other Interfaces	FP-Audio, (2) RGB-LED, (2) D-LED, TPM, Asus NODE, Thermistor, (2) Water FlowD
Diagnostics Panel	Numeric
Internal Button/Switch	Power, Reset, Boot Retry / MemOK
SATA Controllers	Integrated (0/1/5/10)
Ethernet Controllers	WGI219V PHY
Wi-Fi / Bluetooth	Intel 9560 802.11ac 2x2 (1.73Gb/s) / BT 5 Combo
USB Controllers	✗
HD Audio Codec	ALC1220
DDL/DTS Connect	✗

we know Z 390 is the latest chipset launch from Intel and it is here to stay now what we've actually got today is the Zeus ROG Maximus 11 hero Wi-Fi and just to sort of give you an idea of where this sits the Maximus 11 range of ROG boards is their highest source PEC boards and the hero kind of sits about in the middle of that based on price and also functionality so let's jump in and see how it compares against others the 390 boards that are out on the market

before jumping straight into the board let's talk about what comes included in the box so inside we can find that it contains a sheet of stickers a coaster driver CD case badge sticker Wi-Fi antennas a sli HB bridge RGB breakout cables 4 SATA cables two of which are right-angled a manual a cable mudventure n dot 2 screws and a front panel Q connector these are super useful as they allow you to connect up all your front panel headers outside of the chassis and simply

place the connector on the motherboard make an installation a lot easier so now let's talk about the board itself it features an ATX form factor and I'm pretty sure that you're going to agree with me the styling is well pretty nice so what you'll find is styling wise it pretty much is consistent with what azuz have done in the past with our ROG range everything kind of comes in a plain matte black fill with lots of kind of brushed metal and just really nice premium

looking heat sinks on there in terms of branding on the board you'll see that it says Maximus 11 on the rear i/o heatsink shield cover we also have the word hero on the top heatsink república gamers on the middle MDOT 2 slot and also the ROG logo across the PCH heatsink in terms of RGB areas on this board there are only actually two on the board there is one up by the rear i/o and one down by the PCH heatsink now it would have actually been nicer to see maybe a few more RGB features on this board but it doesn't mean that you can't extend them features

beyond your motherboard there's plenty of room for RGB headers including addressable and we're going through them a little bit later on and yes they can all be controlled using the Zeus or a sync software overall I'm gonna be honest with the styling and design I actually really really like it I think it looks premium it looks professional it looks extreme and it looks like it really means business so I guess we'll find out whether it does or not when it comes to the

performance in terms of the CPU socket it includes a 10 phase power design which is more than enough power for both faith and nitrogen Intel processors it's ample power delivery for overclocking as well as we will see later on in this review to deliver that power it includes a single 8 pin and a single 4 pin power connector just above the CPU socket in terms of heat dissipation you're actually fine there's a lot of cooling on this board so starting with the rear i/o you can see that well we've got a heat sink that's chunkies balls it's absolutely huge and this kind of

encompasses one of the heat sinks that goes around the CPU socket to the left hand side there's also one at the top with a hero branding on there and we also have one over the end to slot with the republic' again as logo I'll see the PCH heatsink itself and then we have another MDOT 2 slot which kind of converges from the PCH you also have a further heatsink covering over the audio area just to give her a little bit more sort of cooling performance to the audio capacitors

in terms of memory support you'll find that typically with a Zed 390 board there are four dimm slots in total now on this particular board it supports up to 64 gigabytes of ddr4 4400 megahertz and beyond with full XMP 2.0 support it's worth noting that the DIMM slots don't actually have armor shielding as many boards in this price range do obviously a Zeus felt that this wasn't necessary but you will find that actually in the middle of the DIMM slots there is a

slight sort of brace I guess you'd call it a metal brace so maybe this is kind of all it needed to to have that extra stability that we've maybe sinned on past boards from a Zeus so now I want to talk about fan headers and other connectors and headers on the board so you may want to sit down for this one because there's a lot so in terms of RGB headers there are two addressable RGB headers and to normal RGB headers there's also a single USB 3.1 gen2 USB 2.0 ports a

USB 3.1 gen2 front panel header connector a TPM connector 8 fan connectors 1 CPU header 1 CPU optional header and then 6 additional headers for chassis fans three of which also double as pump headers there is also an external fan header some temperature water flow sensors and the usual reset and start buttons as well as a memo K and a Zeus retry button the retry button basically allows you to hard reset your system without losing your BIOS settings which is especially handy if you're overclocking the amount of times where people forget to save their

profiles have to wipe their bios and go back in and try and remember all of them settings this is just a simple way of retrying and maybe tweaking the voltage a little bit more so that it does actually boot a really handy feature in and pretty early you're going to agree with me that some of the features of zeus have actually implemented into their boards in sort of the last couple of years in terms of overclocking have really sort of pushed the boundaries for what everyone was asking for and well no one else actually came along and did for all of your storage needs there's

six SATA 3 ports which also operate in raid 0 1 5 & 10 if you want to have either redundancy or that extra performance boost in terms of m dot 2 as we said earlier there are two m dot two slots on here the top one supports 22 42 22 60 20 to 80 and satyr and PCIe based modules whereas the second one supports 20 to 40 to 20 to 60 20 to 80 and 20 to 110 but only supports PCI Express 3.0 x4 modules it's also obtained ready and as we mentioned earlier there are two lovely-looking heat sinks on here just to help with that heat dissipation if you are an enthusiast

and find that your MDOT 2 drivers may be getting a little bit warm [Music] in terms of our expansion slots there's actually three PCI Express x16 slots but only the top one actually operates x16 speeds if you're utilizing the top x16 slot on the second one it will operate at x8 speeds and the bottom slot will always operate a hex four speeds it's also worth noting that the top two also include a zeus patented armor technology which is essentially some shielding that goes around the PCI Express slot to give stability to the graphics card for heavier graphics

cards and also to stop things such as interference there is also support for SLI NV link and crossfire X there it is worth noting that if you are going down the multi-gpu configuration route if you are actually utilizing all three slots then they will operate at X 8 X 4 and X 4 on top of that you're also find that there are three PCI Express 3.0 x1 slots so now that we've looked at the key specifications and features at the board it's time to see well where do all these connectors and features actually apply let's look at the rear i/o and see exactly what we get from left to right there is a clear CMOS button a feature that I've loved on a zoospores for many

many years now as well as a USB BIOS flash back button there's a ps2 mouse keyboard combo port two USB 2.0 ports one of which is for updating and flashing your BIOS a display port HDMI port land port featuring Intel's eye - one 9v Gigabit LAN and has anti surge lan guard and rogue gain first technology there is also three USB 3.1 gen2 type and a Gen 2 type C port as well as two USB 3.1 gen2 on type a port there's two antennas for the Wi-Fi which features the wireless AC 95/60 dual band with bluetooth 5.0 for our audio needs there are five audio jacks

with an optical s/pdif port in terms of audio obviously there's so many different codecs and controllers out there and a Zeus of always prided themselves on using one of the best they actually feature the rog supreme FX 8 channel HD audio codec s12 to zero it features an ESS es 9 0 to 3 p DAC and has gold-plated jacks sonic radar 3 so preme effects shielding technology I mean just reading that out you can tell they mean business when it comes to audio and that's probably the main reason why there's this heatsink cover over the audio and you can see that

they use gold capacitors as well nietzsche con if i remember rightly so i'm actually really impressed with sort of what they're able to offer on the audio side of things but how does that translate to performance on the rest of the board well before we actually talk about the performance i guess really we need to talk about overclocking but this is where the disclaimer comes in so all xiii 90 boards pretty much perform the same in terms of performance at stock as well as overclock so the overclock that we got on this was pretty much what we got on every

other said 390 board we was able to push out I 999 hundred K which is a pretty sure you agree yeah Oh a very hot chip we were able to push that to 5 gigahertz out one point three five one point three six volts obviously you do get a little bit of the droop in there which I'm you know pretty happy with is a good number but it would have been nice to maybe get some slightly higher numbers with some more expensive boards but I guess it doesn't all just come down to overclocking maybe that's the fault of Intel and not necessarily a Zeus or some of the other

brands out there so now that we've got overclocking out the way let's talk about the performance and run them glorious benchmarks , so pricing wise is one thing that I want to talk about as I said in the start of this review the Maximus 11 sort of range from Zeus ROG is kind of you know always the top spec and the hero actually Falls sort of Midway into that in terms of price and features and this is actually very competitively priced you can pick this board up currently on Amazon and we will link to this in the description below

and shipping I mean looking at some of the other boards we have actually reviewed already I'd say this is probably the one of the best value for money boards out there purely because you do get quite a lot of features in terms of that amazing audio the fantastic heat dissipation nice RGB features the fact that you can put dress-up or RGB headers on there good memory support USB 3.1 gen2 type a type see it's pretty much got it all the only thing maybe I would have liked

to have seen is a plx chip so we could maybe get a little bit more bandwidth out of it but that's not a necessity and it does bump the price up quite a bit as we've seen from other manufacturers so overall I'm actually really happy with this is plenty of fan headers on there and I don't think anyone will really be able to max out this board if you do find yourself maxing out the board then Zeus have you covered there as well they have the Maximus 11 formula and

also the extreme if you really want to go down that route for the most part though I think many people are going to be really pleased with the hero personally it's probably one of my favorites a 390 boards I said I'm really happy with it I love the design I love the features and I love that price as well let us know what you think in the comments section below .

ASUS ROG Maximus XI Hero (Wi-Fi) Z390 Gaming Motherboard LGA1151 review

the thing you need to know about Maximus series is that it is an enthusiastically driven motherboard which aims at pleasing the craziest builders out there. If you're gonna go for a custom water-cooling configuration ,simple or dual loop, this is the kind of series you want to go for. And the Hero Edition is the entry level of that enthusiastic realm. And to my surprise it did come with a bunch of new features which some of which did surprise me. So going straight to the obvious the ROG Maximus XI Hero is an ATX motherboard meaning thirty point five

centimeter long for twenty four point four centimeter wide as usual it is powered by an LGA 1151 CPU socket which can support both the eighth and ninth generation of Intel iCore processors. Note that the VRMS are definitely beefier than the previous generations and can output at least double the wattage that the 10th series could and that's because the ninth generation and in particular the i9 9900 K needs tons of power to run optimally so it is no

surprise to see that we have larger thicker and bigger heat-thinks than on its predecessors. Memory wise we have the usual dual channel which can support up to 64 gigabytes of ddr4 ram overclockable up to four thousand four hundred megahertz. This is much much more than previously featured on its predecessor:the Hero X, which only had up to 4,133 MgHZ overclockable ram and even more than this very motherboard siblings Prime Z390-A or as the Strix Z390 series which had a ram overclockable up to 4,266 megahertz so kudos to Asus for

this. Staying in the memory we have a dual M.2 solid-state drive configuration. One which can support sticks up to eight centimeter long and one up to 11. Worth notting the Z390 chipset just as its predecessors, is Optane ready, meaning that both of our M.2 solid-state drives can swap data up to 32 gigabits per second each but with these kinds of speeds of course we are going to face some overheating on our sticks and that's why both of them have individual heat shields

which are also equipped with thermal pads. PCIe wise nothing surprising. We have our usual six third generation PCIe expresses. Three single slots, single speeds and 3 16 slots with different speeds. Note that only the closest one to the CPU can feature up to 16 full BUS speeds so if you have one and only GPU to run on your computer this is where you want it for optimal performances and if you are going to go for a dual GPU configuration you want it to be on

those two 16 slots and they will be sharing their BUS speed to feature an 8x8 full bus speed the last six in slot will feature two or four full bus speed depending of the bias configuration notice that because the two first 16 slots are most likely to carry is a heavyweight of our video cards they have been metallically reinforced SATA wise and as usual this motherboard will support six third generation SATA plugs which can all transfer up to six gigabit per second individually

and i/o eyes our motherboard features are fully integrated IO shield and talking about are you starting from the left we have our BIOS and CMOS button right here a ps2 mouse keyboard connector to USB second generation connectors which can both transfer up to 480 megabits per second for 3.1 second generation USB plugs which can transfer data up to 10 gigabit per second to 3.1 first generation USB plug which can transfer data up to five gigabit per se and here we have our DisplayPort as well as an HDMI display output our surge protected Gigabit LAN and

here we have our usual dual band Wi-Fi adapter which comes with not so usual 2x2 Wi-Fi mumumu I know it's a very cute name what does that mean both of our Wi-Fi antenna have individual and dedicated Wi-Fi streams that's going to translate in better coverage faster download speeds and an overall improvement in connectivity Barracuda super kudos triple kudos to Asus for integrating this new standard hump this awesome board finally here we have five audio channel plus optical alright so let's take a closer look to our connectors on our

motherboard so as usual we have a couple of second-generation USB connectors right here which can both transfer up to 480 megabit per second a 3.1 first-generation connector right here which can transfer up to five gigabit per second and a 3.1 second generation type see front panel connector which can transfer that up to 10 gigabit per second and let's not forget our usual front panel audio connector right here alright so we've seen the usual suspect on this

motherboard but here come my favorite part of this review the enthusiastic slash esthetical part of it and this motherboard has pictures to feel compared to its Maximus X predecessor and a lot of expectations coming from the enthusiastic community because again this motherboard supposedly should give you the very extreme of what's out there in terms of builds and should be able to support absolutely anything your money can throw at it and of course it does not disappoint starting with the fans this motherboard can support natively up to eight fans plus an extension which can add another four fans on this thing so potentially twelve fans in the same

time and I should give you a hint on how extreme the thing is note that out of those eight fans two of those plugs can be used for water pumps so yes our rock Maximus 11 ero Edition can support a single or dual custom water cooling loop configuration custom loop water one or two you got it but that is not all our motherboard come with an external thermal sensor right here a water flow sensor right here and then water flow in and out sensor right here again aiming at leasing the most extreme builders out there alright so moving on in the true mark of an

enthusiastic motherboard we have articulate screen which will allow us to monitor and troubleshoot our system in case of problems right next to it we have our soldered button start and reset and somewhat a poorly placed man ok button all the way down there that is a lot but that's not all of course this motherboard is over compliant if you don't know what his our compliance is well worry not because I got a review right about this topic and in a nutshell our compliance is is basically a sinking RGB effect that will sync all your different components

RGB in harmonious way it's been around for a while and all the big manufacturers have their own version of it and here we have 200 RGB strips hidden right under the eye of chipset heat shield and under the eye roof and if that's not enough and in the case you wanted to add a bunch of different RGB strips to your build we have - or a complaint RGB connector right here and to RGB addressable connector right there so there's nothing more aces can throw at you really nothing more so in conclusion this board and again I know this is not a cheap board but

that is not the aim of that board because when you go in the Maxima series you're looking for the very best enthusiastic board can offer and I said board like six times in a sentence so an a politically not a budget board even though it's an entry level this is probably best Eero motherboard I've seen in this particle iteration we have real real advances which was not a given knowing that the z3 90 chipset is exactly the very same one that were available on the maximum standard z3 70 chipset I mean there is a both support the very same process of AIDS

in the ninth generation but unlike my conclusion in the 390 Prime a or the Strix which I did again last week I would argue and I would definitely advise to do the upgrade between the Maximus 10 to the Maximus 11 and that's because I have seen real advancement first it's a ram clock going from 4000 133 megahertz to four thousand four hundred mega so you have a bump of what five percent which is quite a lot on top of that we have also this new movie move thingy

and after trying it there is no way back I sorry I cannot go back to anything else oh really triple kudos to Asus for that but we also have bigger V RMS and bigger heat shields on them so you're going to be able to overclock those ninth generation of Intel processor easily up to four point eight of five gigahertz without double thinking it at all so that's really really cool and you know that's one of those boards where I really have nothing bad to say I think the price point is

really fair I think the over make up this motherboards build quality is beyond premium it's absolutely perfect and yeah so you know what it's a must buy and I'm gonna feature this board on my next step by step build series instead of going to the formula I'm just gonna go on the hero it's gonna save me some money and I think that it has absolutely everything we need to have ourselves a real cool time or good time and you know what I meant. alright that said, that's it for me!

z3 90 is finally amongst this and so is ASUS Maximus six here our formula a step up from the Z 370 Maximus hero 5 that you may already have since this is a flagship board we will be putting it through a lot of different tests and telling you guys if it's worthy of that flagship title without aside let's get straight into the meat and potatoes of this review , walking back to Tokyo sitting right here is a 10 faves BRM design implemented on this board using vishay silicon ax si six seven three nine dual stage MOSFETs now I couldn't find a whole lot of info on these

MOSFETs but I will say when it comes to overclocking and the real-world results this is where it really matters and honestly this board has done better than any Z 370 board as well as doing better than other Z 390 counterparts when I tested it with a particular CPU that puts out a lot of heat and it did so well to the point where it was using less power it was also getting good overclock and keeping them stable at certain levels for the chokes they've implemented 60 amp solutions and then after that you've got your niche akan FP 10k capacitors on board which will

do a mighty fine job for whatever you need it to do especially if you're on air or water overclocks this thing is not gonna have a problem at all right beside that 8 pin you've also got an additional 4 pin to give the CPU extra power if it's so needs it move you through the board itself you've got 8 PWM fan headers as well as one 3 pin for a water cooler so 9 fan headers in total we've also got to RGB outs for 4 pins and also to RGB outs for the three pin solutions as this we've also implemented a power button as well as a doctor debug LED light which is great

for LN to overclock is on the rear of the board you also get the clear CMOS button and the switch BIOS for the dual bias implemented on this board and then when it comes to the ddr4 memory overclocks they say they support up to 40 400 megahertz unfortunately the memory I had on here only went up to 3,700 megahertz I couldn't test past that because I don't have extreme overclocking tools and also really good memory to test that but in terms of overclocking the memory it did the best again out of any board that I've had here in terms of

overclocking that particular set of memory and then glancing a little bit further down the board you've got your implementation of the ROG heatsink which can be controlled with the Ora software and you can even control that in the boss itself setting in different modes if you don't wish to install the software on Windows the shroud at the top will also glow with RGB lighting so you do have two different zones here on the board itself besides that we've got three

PCI 16x slots although only the top one itself is true 16 slot the one below that is eight times and then there's one at the bottom four times and if it's one thing I do have to pick a bone with the Z 390 in general which is not a Zeus's fault is that they've only included 1/16 speed slot I'd like to see the CPUs themselves support more lanes and also the motherboards have 216 speed slot solutions so you can then link up to RTX 28 ET is for example in 32 times for both those graphics cards there's also an additional three 1x lots of PCIe coverage as well as having two

nvme PC a 3.0 4 speed slots that do have heat sinks on both the slots themselves when testing the bottom and the primary slot for this we notice the temperatures do go down quite a bit on the heatsink itself we had 48 degrees when running a 100 gigabyte stress test and with the heatsink off it was 91 degrees on the thermal imaging camera also on the software we reported 61 degrees versus 92 degrees itself so this heatsink is doing a great job of cooling down nvme to

flash-based storage devices however moving over to the right of the board with the supreme FX audio solution a lot of you guys tell me you love the audio testing that gets done around takia city and so analyzing this solution here they've got a 192 kilohertz 24 bit ADC solution implemented and then also for the audio out you've got 32 bit 192 kilohertz solution that's what these supported rates but also when we're testing the audio itself for things like the frequency response curve especially in something that normal people will listen to we've noticed that the

roll-off here below 7 Hertz was only like 1.4 decibels and then the frequency response curve after that was incredibly flat so this is a phenomenal implementation of onboard audio the mic import itself also had a noise suppression that was clearly visible when we turned it up to a hundred volume 30 plus 30 dB you can see that there was a little spike when we tried to change it which does indicate that there is noise suppression but it will give you a clearer signal just

don't use it for professional recordings but if you're using it for gaming your mates are going to be able to hear you absolutely fine with no noise whatsoever move over to the left and right channel balance we had only a point one to point two decibel difference between the left and right channel which is again is phenomenal values and then - crosstalk numbers they were - 80db and lower and this is the thing with the volume here the volume is quite strong stronger than previous generations of motherboards so you will be out of power pretty hungry

headphones that need that extra power but also after the volume level of 90 just like a lot of other solutions there is a slight bit of crosstalk leaked into the right channel this is a very common problem I guess on the ELC Realtek 12:20 solution that a lot of multiple manufacturers implement on their motherboards don't a nutshell if you're getting this motherboard for the audio just set the volume to 90 or below and you'll have happy days before we get back to the overclocking and also the BIOS will quickly take a look at the rear

input/output eight USB slots one of those being a Type C DisplayPort and HDMI port outs ps2 out as well as the clear CMOS and BIOS switch buttons as we mentioned before you've got a wireless solution ac included which comes with its own antenna tested the speeds of the on-board it included Nick and that was fine all the way up to 1 gigabit per second as well as having manual 5.1 surround and an optical output which I hope motherboard manufacturers never get rid of this port I absolutely love it anyway overclocking now let's roll things back now to the

overclocking and as I said before I can only talk about a CPU which put out a lot of heat at this very point in time and this motherboard the vrm and the heatsink the heatsink weighs about 300 grams and when we looked at it with the vrm thermal imaging camera with an overclock on a particular CPU at a particular speed we managed to see that the vrm was going around 50 degrees this was out of the box the veeram itself was only going up manually on the thermal imaging camera to around 56 degrees so this was phenomenal performance on this

implementation from a Zeus as well as the power efficiency being very good when I compared it to other boards here so they've definitely got things right in terms of the magic behind the implementation of the hardware on this board itself but women move on to the BIOS this is where things really don't need to get any better Zeus his implementation of their bias has all the features you would want for overclocking LLC levels as well as recommendations as well as preset overclocks for memory and also overclocking - things like a five units they've got that

included too so in a nutshell itself the Z 390 Maximus hero 6 is definitely going to be the board you'll want to get if you want flagship performance now keep in mind this thing will come at a premium I actually don't know the official pricing yet but expect it to be maybe slightly more than the current Z 370 Maximus 5 and I really can't fault this board for anything in particular maybe other than

the price performance which on a premium flagship motherboard you're always going to pay a premium so everything from the onboard audio to the vrm to the bios feature set it's all practically perfect and a Zeus do get this right they know what they're doing when it comes to making motherboards and without a sight I hope you guys enjoyed this review of the Maximus 6 hero .