ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME Motherboard Review

How Much Does It Cost?

The ASUS AMD Ryzen ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME AM5 PCIe 5.0 EATX Motherboard is available now from Scan for around £929.99. That is an extreme investment and one that’s clearly going to be putting off the vast majority of PC builders. However, as much as this board seems to be expensive to deliver big performance, it’s not, it’s all that extra connectivity that adds to the price.

Overview

If you’re an extreme gamer, then there’s no doubt about it, there are better gaming motherboards out there. If you’re doing a bit of rendering and need some fast connectivity, there are better motherboards out there. If you need to watch your budget, then there are most definitely better motherboards out there.

So why would anyone buy this motherboard, when it’s a little bit slower, and I do stress that it is a little bit, and typically a lot more expensive? Well, reliability is why. The hardware here is extremely well made, and actually bordering on being over-engineered for the task. If you’re running a 3D rendering scene or video at extremely high resolution using extremely large assets and file sizes, and you’re doing that task for days on end, then that’s where this motherboard will start to take charge.

The cooling and power delivery hardware aren’t just designed to win a sprint through a benchmark or even an hour-long stress test. It’s designed to do this all day, all night, and then keep on going without throttling, without overheating, and without crashing. It’s built to finish the marathon when it comes to heavy-duty tasks, and still be ready for another.

For content creators on an extremely high-end of the scale, it’s got a lot of appeal. The quad USB-C and 40 Gbps ports, Type-C display port, dual LAN, PCIe Gen 5 storage and more. You can hook up your RAID NAS for mega storage needs, your DAS to the Type-C for your scratch disks, your ultra-fast external backup drives and load in files from multiple sources such as high-resolution video cameras and storage devices, and still have all the overhead you need to deliver big read and write performance to even more internal and external drives while rendering. You can deal with a significant amount of a production pipeline from one motherboard.

Should I Buy One?

If you want to game or do daily high-end PC stuff, it’s total overkill and you can literally get faster performance for less. However, if you have a need for connectivity, no, a thirst for connectivity when it comes to ultra-fast internal, external and networked storage devices, then it’s absolutely in a league of its own. I can see this motherboard largely appealing to those working in game development and movie production, and pretty much nobody else.