ASUS Crosshair VI Hero Review

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Conclusion

The Final Words 

The Ryzen launch has been a bit of a mixed bag. The platform and processors have the potential to offer great value for money. It performs great, fantastic even in any application. Yet we cannot look away from the fact that game performance in the enthusiast range remains somewhat limited. Enthusiast cards and multi-GPU combinations can run into a CPU bound situation at lower resolutions. These processors still offer plenty of performance if you game at 2560x1440 or higher, or stick to a mid-range graphics card. 

What is going on with CPU bound game perf?

The theory right now is that there is a bandwidth challenge in-between the two CCXes (the Ryzen 7 processor has two CPU clusters each holding four cores and caches). These two CCXes communicate with eachother over an interlink and it seems the bandwidth there is a limiting factor weirdly enough, just for CPU gaming. You can compensate, as that interlink is tied to the frequency of the memory bus, thus faster memory helps. Ever since our first Ryzen review we already detected that Ryzen benefits from faster memory performance more than it should, well, that is the reason. So please get yourself at least 2667 MHz memory. It will not solve the problem itself, but will surely help in game performance. BTW ALL our tests with Ryzen 7 processors have been performed at 2667 or 3000 MHz.

The motherboard

Right, back to the motherboard. ASUS has one of the most enticing offerings with this X370 series motherboard. It functions well and offers a wide feature set. Please be sure that you flash the latest firmware to this new platform. Earlier revisions did have some bugs that effected performance and CPU voltages in a negative way. This is also the reason why we delayed our X370 reviews a bit, we wanted to give the board partners a few week to get such a new and rushed-to-the-market platform to mature. ASUS succeeded here, but at € 289 the Crosshair VI Hero is certainly expensive for the features it offers. That said, I am also issuing a bit of a warning: we have no doubt that with the new generation processors and chipsets there are bound to be a few motherboard firmware updates and fixes for smaller bugs. Hey, it comes with the territory. We quite honestly did not run into stuff that massively worried us. The motherboard used seems pretty well tuned, we had no stability issues.



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Power Consumption

If you choose Ryzen 7 1700, with eight cores you're fine. With this processor now fabbed at 14 nm FinFET the TDP sticks at a low 65 Watts and with the system at idle I was a little shocked, with a GeForce GTX 1080 installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the X370 motherboard I hovered at just under 50 Watts. That's just great and that is testimony to the 14nm fabrication as smaller packages can do with less voltage. When we stressed the processor with a Prime 1024M run we reach roughly 125 Watts, that's low enough for what it needs to be, but we do find it higher than expected. Overall though this is impressive to see. When we game we hover at ~250 Watts, but obviously that factor is dependant on the type of graphics card you use of course. So yeah, these are really good values with a many core product. No complaints here whatsoever.

Some performance tips

If you'd like to boost your performance, especially for gaming, here are a few Guru3D tips:

  1. Update your motherboard to the latest firmware BIOS.
  2. Make sure you have your memory at at least 2667 MHz with CL16 - 2133 MHz will hurt game performance.
  3. For best game performance, set your Windows energy performance mode to HIGH.
  4. Tweak your processor, we reached 4.0 GHz on all cores on just air cooling- this is your biggest gain for game performance - but will eat more energy.

For the Ryzen 7 1700 we reach a stable 4.0 GHz on ALL cores. With proper liquid cooling and a lucky 1700 we have no doubt that you will reach 4.1 GHz on all eight-cores as well. The 100 MHz is not going to make much difference though. After that number things will start to get complicated. The Ryzen 7 1700 is easy to overclock, you could increase the voltage but we advise the AUTO voltage mode really. Then select your multiplier of choice and you are good to go.  

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 The conclusion

The X370 motherboards in our reviews will all be fitted with the 329 USD Ryzen 7 1700, that processor is golden and will offer you pretty much the same amount of performance as the 499 USD Ryzen 7 1800X once you tweak it. Since you are opting for the ASUS HERO board (hey, why read this review otherwise) we also assume you will be tweaking it. So yes, that might be a golden combination, albeit we find the HERO to be on the expensive side compared to what the competition is doing. Also let me remind you that Ryzen 5 is coming in April, six and four core enabled processors with SMT at an even better price. Once again everything about AMD screams value, so if you can pick up the more affordable processor, you probably could go for the HERO budget wise as you saved on the money for the processor. We feel with the latest BIOS the platform is strong, stable and easy to tweak. ASUS offers a nice looking board that is Aura LED configurable and then offers all the usuals like the two x16 (x8 Gen 3) slots for SLI and Crossfire, a very nice audio solution and of course an M.2 slot. Features like USB 3.1 are plentiful as well. On the memory side of things everything for Ryzen is still a little rough. With an Intel board you select an XMP profile and you are good to go. With this AMD platform you are better off configuring frequency, timings and voltage manually. This however is an easy enough thing to do yet remains something that needs to be improved. AMD and their board partners MUST steer towards a proper XMP like methodology, simply for ease of use and balanced compatibility alone. 

We once again sorely miss AC WIFI and we are also wondering why the industry has not moved to CAT7 and 5/10 GBit compatible Ethernet jacks? These two lacking features are a bit of a missed opportunity IMHO. The motherboard otherwise feels stable thanks to a really quality build with proper components used, it is mature and comes with a very nice UEFI BIOS as well. I do love the dedicated PUMP FAN header (most people these days have some sort of liquid cooling going on). This review has covered most of the hardware on the motherboard, I do like to mention that ASUS has an excellent software suite allowing you to control all these fan headers in software as well. Whether or not Ryzen 5 or 7 is for you remains something only you can decide. This conclusion however is not about Ryzen but needs to be about the actual motherboard tested, and sure, we would definitely recommend the ASUS ROG Crosshair VI Hero Flagship, but the price for this Hero is steep.

ATH +++

- Hilbert out

“A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge.”

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