Back when ASUS launched their Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand it launched with the Crosshair NVIDIA nForce based AM2 motherboard. This was of course in the hayday when AMD was the leader in CPU performance. With Intel becoming more popular and less people using AMD the Crosshair brand did not receive as much love from ASUS. With AMD’s Ryzen processor coming, the new AM4 socket, and the AMD X370 chipset, ASUS is back with a new Crosshair branded motherboard.
This motherboard might be the board to get for the X370 platform as it seems to be the most elaboarately designed AM4 motherboard that we’ve seen. The board is built in the ATX form factor, draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, 8-pin EPX, and 4-pin ATX power connectors and will feature a 12-phase VRM.
The board has a pretty much all black design with some silver and grey accents. You’ll find aggressive heatsinks on the board as well as plastic I/O cover that runs down the far edge of the board. The board of course has RGB LED headers, with support for ASUS’s own Aura Sync platform.
You have four DDR4 DIMM slots, which support for up 64GB of dual-channel memory. For expansion there are two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slots (x8/x8 when both are populated) wired to the CPU, a third PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot (x4 electrical), and three x1 slots. For storage there are eight SATA 6 Gb/s ports, and a single 32 GB/s M.2 slot with NVMe boot support.
You also have 12 USB 3.0 ports (eight on the rear panel, four by headers), and four USB 3.1 ports (two on the rear panel, two from headers). Networking includes 802.11ac WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and Gigabit Ethernet via an Intel-made controller. The board also has ASUS’s highest grade onboard audio solution, which is the SupremeFX. It features ESS 9023P DAC, RC4580 buffer chip, a high-precision clock-generator, a de-pop circuit, Nichicon Muse audio-grade capacitors, ground-layer isolation, and EMI shielding over the key components.
