Hardware Asus Maximus IX Hero Review

Yeah..well done Asus on re-positioning the Start & reset buttons to the bottom of the board which makes them completely inaccessible to people with SLI set ups once the PSU is in place.

On my Hero VII (Z97) they're at the top right, next to the boot LED error display & RAM slots, you know..where they're actually usable whilst the PC is powered up.

That alone would stop me from getting this board again and switch to the Gigabyte Gaming 7.

 

Ooh, another £240+ motherboard! Excuse me while I go and fetch my credit card... or not. Whilst it's great that we have all of these high-end enthusiast boards floating around, I'd be interested to see a lower-end Z270 board in the mix too. The idea of dropping £250-plus on a motherboard is absolute madness to me, and although I appreciate that Bit is an enthusiast site, I'd like to see more value-conscious offerings being reviewed too.

You may well get what you pay for, but there are also diminishing returns as the price shoots up. What I'm not keen on is the tacit assumption that you have to pay top dollar for high-end components in order to secure a decent feature set or level of performance. Back in the day I used to obsess over different products and often bought ones with extra features, but as time has gone by I've realised that extra cost for extra features is wasted money if you don't need or use those features. Now, I'd prefer to pay less for certain components (as long as I get the features that I need) and use any excess monies on things where I'll actually notice a real-world difference.

 

Welcome to middle age.

A time when you have the money to spend but feel it's morally indefensible to spend £600+ on a GPU or those worn out comfy slippers need replacing but feel compelled to get another months wear out of them.

 

The only reason such buttons came into existence was as a convenience for test bench setups. If you have installed your motherboard into a case and are still using the motherboard buttons for start and reset... you're doing it wrong. Asus can't be blamed for that.

A million times this. I actually put a Z270 system together in Scan last night and I'm curious what-in-the-actual-hell difference it makes to spend more than £130 on a motherboard. Oh, you get RGB lighting. SRSLY? That's what motherboard marketing has come to?

The motherboard I specced has everything I need - a big socket for the CPU, some slots for memory and expansion cards, and some USB ports round the back. As if life could ever be so simple.