ASUS Unveils Sexy ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero Motherboard with Passive Cooling

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Images: ASUS

Feeding off the hype of today’s AMD Ryzen 5000 Series announcement, ASUS has shared a look at its latest X570 motherboard for red team devotees: the ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero. This is a sleek, matte-black motherboard that should meet the needs of overclockers who are not only seeking performance, but a clean aesthetic.

It also seems to be a great choice for those of you who can’t stand chipset fans. According to ASUS, this is the first X570 motherboard from the company that features passive cooling. This feat was achieved with a “massive” heatsink for increased heat dissipation.

“The massive amount of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth available from the X570 chipset requires a careful approach to achieve fanless cooling, but we’ve risen to the challenge,” boasted ASUS.

“The Dark Hero is our first X570 board to implement a passive cooling design. A massive high surface area heatsink covers the chipset and extends into the space between the main PCIe slots to provide plenty of heat dissipation. Compared to the active cooling design on the Crosshair VIII Hero, the Dark Hero’s chipset temperature under load is just 2.25% higher in our internal testing.”

“The Crosshair VIII Dark Hero also employs an upgraded power design to efficiently deliver large amounts of clean power to the highest-end next-gen AMD CPUs for Socket AM4,” ASUS added.

“When we provisioned this uprated board, we chose 16 integrated TI power stages, each capable of delivering 90A of current, and deployed them in a teamed power stage topology. This arrangement isn’t just capable of delivering large amounts of power to the processor—it does so in a way that’s highly responsive to the potentially large transient loads of modern CPUs.”

ASUS hasn’t listed the complete specifications for the ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero yet, but integrated I/O options include eight USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (seven Type-A, one Type-C), four USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and 2.5 Gigabit and Gigabit Ethernet jacks. RGB lighting is limited to the ROG logos on the chipset heatsink and I/O shroud.

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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