ASUS RoG Crosshair VI Extreme X370 Motherboard Review

A Closer Look

Without a doubt, this is one of the best looking Ryzen motherboards we’ve seen. The black PCB with grey highlights looks great on its own. However, the VRM, rear I/O guard, and chipset heatsink all look beautifully designed and really make the board deliver a premium quality look and feel.

The heart of the beast is the Ryzen AM4 socket, which comes with the pre-installed stock bracket. However, you can remove this using the screws, where you’ll find this motherboard supports both AM3 and AM4 socket cooling mounts. The VRM/Choke setup looks robust too, which a two-part heat sink and heat pipe configuration ensuring it stays cool, allowing for stable overclocks.

Power Delivery

The voltages get a stability boost thanks to the 8-pin CPU power connector and an additional 4-pin connector.

There are four DIMM slots on this motherboard, offering up support for 3200MHz+ (OC) DDR4 memory.

Fans, and lots of them!

Along the top of the motherboard, there are 6 x 4-pin fan headers, which is awesome for those who use a lot of cooling hardware. There’s also some sensor points, a DEBUG LED, and on-board power controls, all which are handy for enthusiast overclockers.

Those who care to dive deeper into overclocking and tinkering will find an LN2 mode header, slow mode, retry button and more here also. Don’t worry if you don’t know what they do, they’re certainly not features that a day-to-day gamer will need. Another nice feature here is the side mounted 24-pin, which will make cable routing very easy.

Connectivity

Moving down, you’ll find a side-mounted USB 3.0, and 8 x SATA III headers, as well as another fan header.

The chipset cover is huge, but and comes with that lovely ASUS eye logo and RGB lighting, which is sure to look stunning when power on.

Along the bottom row, even more fan, sensor, and USB connections; there’s no wasted space here! There’s also a Molex connector, allowing you to drive more voltage to the PCIe lanes to improve overclocking stability.

The audio hardware is mounted on an isolated part of the motherboard. There’s a powerful DAC and AMP configuration here that’s sure to deliver great audio for everything from surround sound to headsets.

Built-in rear guard!

The rear I/O looks super clean thanks to a built-in rear guard. There are extensive amounts of USB ports here, built-in WiFi, gold-plated audio jacks, optical, Ethernet and more. Also, there are two buttons for CMOS/BIOS reset, which will be handy when you muck up an overclock or setting.

Around the back of the board, you’ll find a durable backplate, helping keep the board from bending, and also providing secure mounts of any of the heat sink on the motherboard.