The Ultimate X370 Showdown

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅22-05-17
Closer Look: ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero

Product on Review: ROG Crosshair VI Hero
Manufacturer: ASUS
Street Price: £239.99 GBP / $249 USD
Technical Specifications

The ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero is another mid ground motherboard in regards to pricing, with a relatively small jump over the X370 Taichi, in fact some places have the ROG CH6H currently for a very reasonable £229.

As an unadulterated ROG motherboard it has features are heavily geared towards enthusiast overclockers and custom water-cooled setups. It features LN2 mode, dedicated water cooling headers to measure flow rate, as well as a 'Pro belt' for direct voltage measurements. The Crosshair VI Hero also features the highest accessible USB count of the motherboards we are looking at, with a total of 19, it gives users full access to all available CPU/chipset provided ports along with an additional USB 3.1 G2 front panel connector. Other stand out features would be that it has legacy AM3 cooler retention holes for backwards compatibility with older coolers, as well as unique support for 3D printed accessories.


Visually, the CH6 is neutral blacks and greys, with aggressive designed heatsinks. The neutral colouring is something that has become common with the rise of RGB LED lighting, ensuring that users always have a motherboard that will fit into their chosen theme.


The CPU is fuelled by a 12phase power delivery system, On the left there is a 4pin fan header (all fan headers output 1A as standard, with a dedicated water-pump header able to output 3A/36W) on the right there is a row of 3x 4pin headers (CPU OPT, CPU, AIO) and hidden behind the DIMMs is the RGB AMD fan header.


Alongside the memory slots we find a USB 3.1 G2 front panel connector, and some voltage measurement points. On the far right there is a Debug LED indicator.


To the left of the storage area is a selection of dedicated watercooling headers, then there are 8x SATA 6Gb/s followed by another 4pin fan header.


The watercooling controls include a Water In/Out and flow headers, beneath which are the standard front panel connectors. There is an additional RGB LED strip header, a 4pin Waterpump connector (3A), a temperature sensor header, speaker header and a USB 3.1 G1 header. The M.2 slot is also located in this area.


Along the bottom edge of the motherboard you will find the HD audio header, a 4pin fan header, a Start/reset/safeboot/retry buttons, an LN2 mode jumper, a slowmode switch, TPM headers, and the ROG EXT header (of which the right side cluster doubles up as a USB 2.0 header.


At the back there are two buttons, one is for Clear CMOS, the other is the BIOS Flashback button. Behind these buttons there is a secret M.2 E-KEY specifically for a WiFi card (included with the latest Crosshair VI Hero A/C). Followed by 8x USB 3.1 G1 ports, 4x USB 2.0 ports, 1x USB 3.1 G2 Type A, 1x USB 3.1 G2 Type C, RJ-45 LAN, HD audio jacks, and SPDIF optical audio out.


The onboard lighting is split between two locations, one above the rear IO, the other on the chipset cooler. It is bright and vibrant and can be controlled along with each of the RGB headers supplied using the ASUS AURA app.


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