ASUS ROG Crosshair X870E Hero AMD X870E AM5 ATX Motherboard, Advanced AI PC Ready, 18+2+2 Power Stages, DDR5, PCIe® 5.0, 5X M.2, Wi-Fi 7, USB4®, AI Overclocking, Core Flex, PCIe Slot Q-Release Slim

I have the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D chip, and this motherboard one-click overclocks it with absolute stability thanks to the built-in AI Overclock feature. I can even fine tune it further with PBO and Curve Optimizer. The motherboard predicts my chip’s SP rating as 120, which is apparently a very good quality rating so I can push my chip card. My setup is close to competing with my cousin’s custom liquid cooling setup and I only have an AIO. This motherboard is absolutely amazing. It took so much of the guesswork out of overclocking and looks great while doing it.

Allow me to begin this review by emphasizing our company's extensive experience in building custom computers over the past 4-5 years. While this is not our sole focus, we take pride in catering to our clients' unique needs, providing them expert advice and tailored desktop solutions.We were excited when the new Generation 5 products came out. Until this build, I must admit we exclusively used Intel processors in all our builds, and we followed along with versions 12, 13, and now 14. Unfortunately, with Generation 5 versions of motherboards, the graphic cards did not upgrade to Generation 5 with their latest versions. Also, even the latest Intel processor 14 versions did not accommodate enough lanes to have a PCIe slot using Generation 5 devices while simultaneously taking advantage of the new Generation 5 NVMe’s. Considering the graphic cards were still Generation 4, if you use the number one PCIe 16 slot for any device, the SSD slot would revert to Generation 4 speed on Intel-based motherboards. You must decide between a graphics card or a Gen 5 NVMe. If you want both, your NVME will run at Gen 4 speeds regardless, on most of the Intel motherboards,Introducing the AMD-based motherboard, a game-changing solution that not only resolves current compatibility issues but also paves the way for the future. With more lanes dedicated to Generation 5 devices, this motherboard is designed to seamlessly integrate with the upcoming Generation 5 graphic cards, slated for release in the fourth quarter of 2024.On the other hand, this motherboard boasts two NVMe slots that fully utilize Generation 5 NVMe M.2s. This means you can now enjoy Generation 5 speed for your data transfers, both internally and externally, if the other device is Gen 5-based. Moreover, you can effortlessly and instantly boost your graphics speed by installing a new Gen 5 graphics card when available.While the price is not for everyone, the motherboard gives you more “bang” for your buck than any high-end Intel-based boards that cost 50-70% more. If you install one, those Intel boards will give a Gen 5 graphics card the upgraded speed. But you’ll still have an issue with your NVMe’s, as they will only operate at Gen 4 speeds, regardless of the drive's speed.We hope the next generation of Intel processors will allow more Gen 5 use, but that is yet to be seen. Right now, this is the best motherboard for a high-end desktop.

I put together a new system that turned out to be extremely unstable. It took me a long time to narrow the problems down to this motherboard - who would think to even check that? All Steam games of decent size (10gb+) were corrupt after installing. Sometimes the files would fail to verify and sometimes Steam would just complain that the installer was corrupt. Also sporadic BSODs, system hangs, and lots of weird quirks.I thought for sure this must be bad RAM, so I ran days of RAM tests, underclocked my memory, tried one stick at a time, etc. Everything came back OK. Well, then maybe the drive itself is bad. I tried multiple formats/reinstalls of Windows. Some were better than others, but all had weird quirks like failing to install updates, hanging indefinitely on shut down, and sporadic BSODs. I even tried a different drive I had sitting around - same problem. I underclocked my CPU and ran lots of torture tests - all came back fine but the problems persisted.After a couple weeks of doing this, I returned to this page and saw the reviews had steadily declined for this mobo and turned my attention to that. Surely a motherboard couldn't cause all of these problems - but of course it did. Finally, I turned on Window Driver Verifier and caught the motherboard red handed - multiple ASUS drivers were misbehaving while all other drivers were fine. I swapped this for a different brand x670e and I haven't had a single problem since. In hind sight, this seems obvious - one place I consistently got a BSOD was in ASUS's Armoury Crate when installing drivers.Do yourself a favor and steer clear of this mobo. The worst part is that the system boots, works fine for many things (I could play the games I wanted to play with lots of re-downloading) but has lots of little sporadic issues. I was fortunate to buy this at a time which qualified for Amazon's extended holiday return period, otherwise I would've been hosed. As near as I can tell, it's ASUS's drivers causing the problems, so an RMA would probably not fix anything.For those technically inclined, among many other issues, this mobo seems to corrupt a very small amount of TCP traffic *after* it's been checksummed, which is just nuts and causes all sorts of problems. Of course a small amount of corruption multiplied by gigabytes of traffic becomes a huge problem.