Asus' ROG brand needs no introduction: since 2006, Asus ROG motherboards have rarely disappointed, and are certainly the brand with the most loyal repeat customers. the Crosshair X670E Hero is a very expensive board: 699 dollars/649 pounds/1,189 Australian dollars, a price level that would have been laughable a few generations ago.

Why so expensive? Pandemic effects, global inflation, and the strong US dollar are partly to blame, but also the need for high-quality printed circuit boards; PCIe 5.0 signal requirements mean that boards must be manufactured to a high standard; the days of $300 flagship boards seem long gone, and the cost of a $300 board is now a fraction of that of a $300 board.

But enough talk about price. Back to the board itself, you would expect this board to be feature-packed, and it stands out with a total of five M.2 slots. Three of them are PCIe 5.0 compatible, one of them via a very well-designed PCIe 5.0 add-in card.

It has six SATA ports, making it a good option for those who store a lot of files.

The board looks great with the ROG brand logo illuminated by RGB lights above the VRM heatsink. Its mirror-like center section, which is predominantly black, will easily blend in with any system theme, as it is completely hidden by the large graphics card.

Asus ROG boards have always featured excellent VRM solutions, and the X670E Hero is no different. It doesn't have the full phase count of competing boards, but don't fret: the 18+2 phases of the 110A stage won't stress a heavily overclocked Ryzen 9 7950X (open in new tab), even with liquid nitrogen cooling.

Cooling is also more than adequate, if not as impressive as Gigabyte's high-end boards, which have a large surface area thanks to finned heat sinks. It is very robustly built, and the load temperature of 52°C when looping Cinebench R23 is not even close to the limit. Even if future Ryzen 8000 or 9000 CPUs require more than 300W, it is unlikely that the X670E Hero will struggle.

Rear I/O is a real strength of this board, with one exception: the Ethernet connection is 2.5G LAN only. At this price, at least 5G should be standard, and 10G is expected. Aside from that, the USB complement is mostly good: two USB 4 ports plus two 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports and nine 3.2 Gen 2 ports. Combined with the internal header, the board supports up to 23 USB ports. This is enough to run all peripherals plus a plasma ball, Christmas tree, and head massager.

Most everything else is standard for a high-end board; WiFi 6E is now standard on higher-end boards, as is an HDMI port for use with the newly introduced integrated graphics of Ryzen CPUs.

The X670E Hero's BIOS follows the layout that ROG boards have used for years. It is packed full of settings, although it may be a bit daunting for beginners. If you like to play around, the Hero probably won't lose much compared to future boards that specialize in overclocking.

The X670E Hero has the most mature BIOS of the five X670 boards I have tested. It boots quickly without any glaring bugs, and the ECO and PBO enhanced modes work well. More details are described below.

System Performance

Gaming Performance

The X670E Hero performed nearly as well as other boards we have tested. In fact, given the novelty of this platform, it is a bit surprising that we did not see more outliers; there is certainly room for AGESA tweaks and optimization. Perhaps we will see performance gains as the BIOS team learns to extract the last 1-2% of performance.

The results cannot be read too far into the margin of error. When the 7950X reaches the 95°C limit, Windows deciding to run one of a million background processes or throttling it just a little can all affect the outcome by such a small margin.

Rather than spend time overclocking and essentially wasting time because the 7950X has limited cooling, I wanted to try the new PBO enhanced mode in Asus' 0705 BIOS. As you can see in the image above, it is in the Extreme Tweaker menu.

You may be familiar with AMD's ECO mode, which allows you to set a TDP limit; Asus' mode sets a temperature limit, which is better than using TDP because it works no matter which cooler you use. 90°C, 80°C, and 70°C are the choices. I chose 80°C. At this setting, my demands on the 360mm AIO cooler were noticeably lower; compared to the default 95°C limit of the 7950X, the fan did not need to spin as much. [The results were surprising: using Cinebench R23, we see that the score for the 7950X is 37129 compared to 38384 for the stock setting. This is certainly a drop, but at the same time a power savings: at a limiting temperature of 80°C, the test system drew a maximum of 305W at all-core load. Compared to 352W at the automatic setting, this represents a savings of almost 50W.

If you are using a 7700X or 7600X, you can expect performance close to stock settings in PBO-enhanced mode; according to Asus, the 7600X at 70°C shows little performance degradation.

Asus' enhanced PBO mode and AMD's ECO mode are excellent features in my opinion. If you don't mind sacrificing a few percent of performance, which is almost intangible, you will be rewarded with a significant drop in temperature and power consumption. I highly recommend trying it out to see if you can really tell the difference in performance.

Asus usually comes out of the gate well when new CPUs and platforms are launched; the BIOS seems mature and we haven't had a chance to really dig into things like memory overclocking or PBO, but boot times and memory compatibility seems to be good.

The Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero is a solid product, but at this price. Of course, broader economic concerns and supply chain issues are partly to blame, but at $699/£649/AUD$1,189, it is by all accounts an expensive product. In particular, the system performance metrics are virtually the same on all boards I tested.

Nevertheless, if you don't mind the lack of 5G or 10G Ethernet, you'll get a solid, reliable, well-made board that will stand up to an upgrade to Zen 5 or 6. At least that's one way to try to get your money back.