ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero review - Introduction

ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero motherboard
Z370 the ROG Way

In this review we check ASUS with their ROG Maximus X Hero. The Hero is a bit more budget aware, yet has that ROG flavor, and that can only mean good stuff. It has great looks and all the features you probably seek for a Z370 motherboard. The motherboard has been fitted with the usual suspects, including a Gigabit based Ethernet jack and on  the board you may house two M2 SSDs. Fairly standard for Z370 sure, however the Hero is about, style and price and offers a nice balance there. Yeah we test the new Coffee Lake platform.

Coffee Lake are the new 8th generation desktop processors from Intel, including the new mainstream six-core part. A product line that is the direct answer and effect from what AMD has been pursuing aggressively in the desktop processor channel. With this first 'mainstream' step from intel they will offer 6-core processors. These will need to be paired with a new motherboard chipset and thus motherboard, the Z370 based ranges. With the introduction of Ryzen and more recently the announcement of Threadripper processors the processor market and channel has been turned up-side down, and Intel is slowly waking up from it's S3 deep-sleep state finally realizing that they cannot keep serving just quad-core processors in mainstream, as they have been doing for subsequent years now. AMD gave Intel a serious awakening call and as such they needed to step up, significantly. Intel’s primary processor business has been releasing and refreshing quad-core processors for many years combined with high-margin spicy priced E type (e.g. Broadwell-E / Haswell-E / Skylake-X) processor release every now and then. You can't really blame Intel either as there simply was no competition - hence they had no rush and have been relaxed all the way for years now. Intel did anticipate Zen (or Ryzen), but the AMD consumer aimed Threadripper 16-core and Naples server segment 32-core made Intel step up its game a notch as they shifted into a higher gear ever since Ryzen was released. Over the summer Skylake-X processors have been announced with limited releases and availability for the highest core count procs. Skylake-X however is available in good quantities at for the 10-cores ans 12-core parts, but these start ay 999 Euros for the 10-core version. There is a Intel Core i7-7800X hexa-core avai;able at the sub-400 Euro ranger though, but it needs to be tied towards an X299 motherboard, but these start at 350 euros. Ergo, AMD is outflanking Intel in any and every product segment price wise. This now changes with the Coffee Lake generation of processors that have up-to six-cores alongside more affordable Z370 motherboards.

In this review we look at the ROG Maximus X Hero. The board as stated is positioned in a higher-end region and does look very ROG styled, stuff we like of course. Have a peek and then let's head onwards into the review my man.