Asus has announced the motherboard version of paella, packing loads of ingredients to satisfy even the pickiest tech connoisseurs. The X870E Extreme features the latest internal and external connectivity in addition to physical hardware controls for overclocking, hence its extreme price tag.
Let’s play a game. What would you like to have on your motherboard? Heaps of ports to connect every USB device you own? This board has you covered. Plenty of RAM capacity to satisfy Google Chrome? Take up to 256GB. Can’t decipher the debug LEDs? This one has an easy-to-read segmented display. How about advanced overclocking controls so you can live on the edge? If it exists, chances are you will find it on X870E Extreme. The only thing missing is a bag of chips and a soda can.
Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Extreme is a 30.5cm x 27.7cm E-ATX motherboard powered by AMD’s high-end X870E chipset. It packs 20 (110A) + 2 (110A) + 2 (80A) power phases, fed via dual 8-pin connectors. You will also find two PCIe 5.0 x16 slots with enough room between them for dual graphics card installations. Just keep in mind that speed will be limited to x8 when both are populated. Not a big deal though even for GeForce RTX 5090.
Four DDR5 slots take care of your RAM needs, offering a maximum supported capacity of 256GB, with speeds reaching up to 8,200MT/s on Ryzen 9000 processors. In other words, among the best you can get on AM5. As for storage, you’ll find five M.2 slots, three of which can run at Gen 5 speeds. That said, due to the X870E chipset limitations, using more than one Gen 5 slot will disable or reduce the speed of one of the PCIe x16 slots. If you need more storage, the Gen 4 M.2 slots are plenty fast, not to forget the four SATA ports hiding in the corner.
The enthusiasts out there may be pleased to find a built-in clock generator that separates the CPU base clock from memory, PCIe, and Infinity fabric, allowing advanced overclocking. Furthermore, those owning high-end RAM can try to push above 9,000MT/s, helped by the board’s Nitropath DRAM technology which boosts frequency by 400MT/s over the regular designs. These are complemented by a handful of jumpers for BIOS switching, LN2 mode, etc. Not to mention the segmented debug display and robust cooling to keep temperature in check.
Moving to I/O, we find four USB Type-C ports – comprised of one 40Gbps, two 10Gbps, and one 5Gbps port, plus another eight USB 10Gbps Type-A ports. Add to that one 10GbE plus one 5GbE LAN, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, one HDMI, two 3.5mm audio jacks, and optical audio. The chassis on the other hand gets access to two USB Type-C – 20Gbps and 10Gbps, plus the usual Type-A set.
Now the question that hurts is, how much does Asus ask for all of this? Well, ROG Crosshair X870E Extreme will lighten your wallet by ¥9,999 (£1,040) if you can get one from China, since the board is yet to launch elsewhere. This is about where you would find the Intel variant of this board, so nothing surprising.
