ASUS RoG Crosshair VIII Hero (WiFi) Motherboard Review

Peter Donnell / 5 years ago

How Much Does it Cost?

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, we didn’t have any pricing information that was concrete. However, this is a high-end motherboard, and we are expecting the price to reflect that. We’ll update you as soon as we have more information.

Overview

Throughout all of the X570 motherboards we’ve reviewed for today, all eleven of them, we haven’t seen any that weren’t pretty fantastic to look at. The Crosshair VIII Hero is no exception either. It’s a fantastic looking bit of kit. Gone are the days of the bright red hardware on the Crosshair series, and in its place is this slick monochrome finish. The colossal heatsinks are all cut with matching angles, giving it fantastic style and flow. It’s all usable hardware too, offering superb cooling capabilities to everything from the VRM to the M.2 drives.

Build Quality

As I said, it’s pretty robust, and everything has enough armour on it that it look like it’ll stop a large bullet. It’s all designed to keep the motherboard rigid, but also keep all those vital components operating as cool and efficient as possible. Like many of the other high-end boards, ASUS has gone for some impressive components here though. Such as 2.5G LAN, as well as Gigabit LAN, paired up with the flagship WiFi 6 AX200 for exceptional connectivity. Or the use of gold capacitors for the audio, and armoured PCIe lanes to support heavy-duty GPUs.

Performance

There’s no doubt in my mind this motherboard has some seriously rich overclocking capabilities. It’s what the Crosshair series has always been known for. However, the Crosshair VIII Hero didn’t exactly set the world on fire with the performance today. It’s not bad, not by a long shot, and it is on par with every other X570 motherboard we’ve tested on average. That being said, I just expected a little more given it was using quite a lot of power to do so. Make no mistake though, we’ll dive back into this one with a BIOS update or two in the near future, perhaps in our OC feature, which we’re currently working on. I’m confident it can do a lot better. For an overclocking gaming motherboard though, it’s got a lot more to offer.

Added Value

Stunning networking capabilities are going to make the Crosshair VIII Hero a big hit with enthusiast gamers. As is the fantastic audio we’ve been seeing consistently on high-end ASUS boards for years now. It’s the little details that add up though, such as Truevolt USB, ESD guards, FlexKey, a good number of fan, USB and RGB headers. It’s those little details that are going to stack up and help you build a truly remarkable gaming system.

Should I Buy One

If it was based on looks alone, I won’t stop you, as the Crosshair VIII Hero looks truly stunning from top to bottom. The winners for me though as the superb audio hardware, which can drive high-end audio devices with some serious processing power. If you care about overclocking but want to take out a lot of the stress of it, their 5-way optimisation system is in a league of its own these days too.