ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

Well, there’s no doubt about it, this is one of the best-looking motherboards on the market today. It’s a truly massive piece of hardware too, with an E-ATX form factor making it much wider than ATX motherboards, and providing room for some truly enormous heatsinks and armour that should ensure this motherboard can deliver extreme performance non-stop. The heatsinks on the CPU alone are terrifyingly large, with huge fins and stacked layers of thick aluminium bridged by a huge heatpipe. It will come as no surprise to you that this motherboard is ridiculously heavy too.

Of course, all the heatsink is welcomed, as it’s cooling an impressive VRM which features 20+2 power stages, rated to an equally impressive 110 amps each.

The power stages also have Microfine Alloy Chokes rated at 45 Amps each, and 10K Black Metallic Capacitors, basically all the best of the best, and lots of it. The end result should result in exceptional boost clocks, overclocking and stability in sustained loads.

Dual 8-pin Procool II Power Connectors.

For those using this on a test bench or open-air setup, there are onboard controls to power up the system and reboot. Plus, the Flexkey can be programmed for a whole host of tasks; RGB LED control, BIOS mode, reset button, and much more.

ASUS are well known for their extensive range of BIOS options for its memory controller, and this is no exception. Of course, you get the latest AMD EXPO support, DRAM IC profiles, and AEMP.

“ASUS Enhanced Memory Profile (AEMP) is an exclusive firmware feature for PMIC-restricted memory modules. AEMP automatically detects the memory chips on your kit and then presents optimized frequency, timing and voltage profiles that you can effortlessly apply to unleash performance.” – ASUS

Then there’s the Gen-Z.2 slot for their add-in card, which is the latest take on their DIMM.2 module. It adds another Gen 5 M.2 slot with an upgradable cooling solution.

The bottom half of this motherboard is all armour, but honestly, it’s hiding a lot of impressive hardware in there too. There are two full-size x16 PCIe Gen 5 slots, so the latest in graphics cards and storage devices can make good use of the truly insane amount of bandwidth on tap here.

With all the armour removed, you can see there are two chipsets to deal with the extreme amounts of connectivity, but also a pair of PCIe Gen 5 M.2 mounts too. If that’s not enough, there’s a PCIe 5.0 M.2 card that can occupy one of those PCIe slots too, so you’ve got some pretty interesting options here.

When it comes to cable management, everything should look super clean, as the majority of connections are at 90 degrees to the motherboard, which I absolutely love. There are six SATA, dual USB 3, USB type-C front panel headers, and fan connectors on this side.

the rear I/O is truly bonkers, with FOUR Type-C headers, including those insanely fast USB4 40Gbps ports and two of them also act as DisplayPorts. There are 8x USB 3.2 10 Gbps ports too, and not a single USB 2.0 port. There are dual LANs, with an extremely swift 10 Gbps and 2.5 Gbps port, as well as the latest WiFi 6E. There are five audio jacks too, all gold-plated and hooked up to the fantastic SupremeFX ALC4082 codec, and an ESS® ES9218 Quad-DAC