Conclusion
.final words
The new Crosshair VIII Formula is a thing of beauty really. ASUS did things right with this X570 motherboard. The price though, it has to be said, is hideous for a motherboard. Then again, if you are a RoG gospel believer and pray daily to the RoG gods then really on the X570 there hardly isn't anything better and more beautiful you can get as a motherboard, but at a going rate of 579 USD / 599 EUR that is.
For that money, you receive a thing of beauty that has been fitted with everything X570 offers, and then the RoG stuff like the live dash the EK water block on top of that VRM area as well as simple stuff like metal-reinforced PCIe slots and heatsink covered dual M2 slots. One thing needs to be said, at this price ASUS should have gone for the full 10 Gbps ethernet jack, 5 Gbps is, however, something I am at ease with. What the industry now needs are affordable and energy-friendly Multi-GigE switches so that your home LAN infrastructure finally is getting faster. What ASUS did well was opting the Intel WIFI6 AX module. But Multi-GigE wise, MSI does it better in that regard with their MSI MEG X570 Godlike. The X570 motherboards mostly all have an active fan for the chipset. This ASUS one I rate as very silent. Most manufacturers will also offer RPM setting available from the BIOS to regulate this at your preference. We'll be closely monitoring with all the boards we'll review but again, for this board we had no issues with audible noise.
.ackward
Now the clusterfrack, the CPU performance results overall will be familiar to any other Ryzen 3000 review with a marginal difference. So no-matter if you spend 200 or 600 EUR/USD. The perf will be the same. I'll advance on that, if you pick up a B350 motherboard at 75 bucks and get the latest Ryzen 3000 support BIOS in there, you'll still get the same results aside from maybe a 2-3% margin of error/random occurrences. That is the reality anno 2019. The same goes for tweaking the processor, the 'bottleneck' it the processor and the motherboard plays a near insignificant result in that. I have to say though that a good VRM design matters in temperatures, but all X570 seem to be doing well in that segment.
.conclusion
The Crosshair VIII Formula is an exemplary motherboard that offers all the connectivity and features you need. Other than that you get it all from proper M.2 performance, dual multi-GPU slots, eight SATA3 slots, the USB connectivity. The big plus, of course, is the PCIe Gen 4.0 infrastructure the X570 platform with Ryzen 3000 offers. It does open up a plethora of faster storage options. Then again, a fast PCIe Gen 3.0 storage unit can be (by far) excellent as well. IS a move towards X570 warranted? it depends on what you want and needs of course. But personally, I am inclined to say yes if the budget is not something of a concern to you. if you do not care about PCIe 4.0 storage and future GPUs, B450 and X470 are next in line at far better prices. But do lack things like Multi-GigE ethernet and AX wifi as well. In the end, ASUS has a very appealing product line with this X570 series motherboards. The price is haunting and taunting me though as for this cash I'd rather steer you to the Hero, which is also still too expensive really. realistically based on hardware the Formula is fantastic with a solid design and a well-designed board. Tweaking wise, the motherboards will not be any limitation, the processors however are. Other than its price we have no reason to not recommend the Crosshair VIII Formula so we'll award it was a top pick product but do mentally filter out the cash you need to pay for it.
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