While Asus’ new Hero lacks the metal PCI-E slot shrouds included with both the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 and MSI Z170A Gaming M5, Asus has finally changed the red and black colour scheme of its ROG offerings.
The Hero’s heatsinks sport an elegant dark grey coating, while the board has red details and a black PCB. The large plastic shroud that covers the I/O panel also extends down to the audio circuitry and gives the Hero a racy look that’s a little subtler than the Gigabyte board. In addition to the new colour scheme is RGB lighting control, which enables you to alter the colour and lighting mode of the chipset heatsink’s LED using a downloadable software program.
Layout is very similar to the other two boards on test, although MSI has included an extra 1x PCI-E slot, while both the other boards on test offer an extra M.2 port compared with the Hero’s lone connector beneath the lower 16x PCI-E slot.
Thankfully, while the MSI Z170A Gaming M5 lacks a number of overclocking and testing tools, the Hero includes them all, with power, reset and clear-CMOS switches as well as a POST code display. Meanwhile, an addition to many of Asus’ Z170 boards is a dedicated water-cooling pump header, and while it can only be used with all-in-one liquid coolers, it’s a useful feature that eliminates any worry that your motherboard’s fan control system might interfere with pump performance.
Both USB 3.1 (now called USB 3.1 Gen 2 by some manufacturers) Type-A and Type-C connectors are included on the I/O panel, along with six USB 3 ports. You also get ten SATA 6Gbps ports, although two of them are controlled by an ASMedia controller that will be slower than the Intel-controlled ports.
The Hero’s EFI is top-notch too, and continues an identical theme and layout to its predecessors, featuring easy onepage access to the most popular overclocking settings and an excellent fan control suite. You also get built-in SSD secure erase, Internet BIOS flashing from within the EFI plus useful features such as USB BIOS Flashback and CrashFree BIOS, while features such as RAMDisk and Keybot have been given extensive makeovers too.
Performance-wise, the Hero was a clear winner. We loaded the XMP profile for stock speed performance, which sets the memory at XMP speeds, but also applies a few CPU tweaks, and it resulted in the fastest results in our RealBench suite and game tests. It also managed the fastest speeds with our Kingston HyperX Predator M.2 SSD too, with its read speed of 1,410MB/sec being more than 60MB/sec faster than the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7. We used Rightmark Audio Analyser to test the on-board audio, where it offered a dynamic range of 104.7dB(A) and noise level of -104.8dB(A) – the best results on test, albeit by 5dBA or so. It was a fantastic overclocker too, and the first board we’ve tested to reach 4.9GHz with our Core i7-6700K with a 1.4V vcore, again topping the performance graphs.
The Maximus VIII Hero is fast, overclockable, loaded with features, and offers customisable lighting and an excellent EFI. It might cost £23 more than the MSI Z170A Gaming M5, but it does enough to justify the extra outlay and more.