hey everyone thiago here with pc world today we're going to be taking a look at the x570 hero
from asus we're also going to talk about the dark hero what are some differences this motherboard
has been on the market for a while but if you're looking at a ryzen 5000 or even older 3000 cpu
is it still worth it in 2022. we're going to take a look at the specs we're going
to take a look at some of the performance attributes of this motherboard that way you
can best decide if this is going to be a good value proposition for your motherboard choice
so first let's go over some general information on the x570 hero this is going to be part of the
republic of gamers or rog raag for short this is going to be the entry into the higher end asus
motherboards this is going to be before you get to things like the formula apex extreme the hero
promises to be high-end without the extremely high end price and giving you pretty much the
majority of features that you're going to have on those higher end motherboards and of course
when choosing a motherboard features and as you could call it the spec list are going to be very
important that's going to be one of the primary reasons that you would go from something like this
to maybe something a little cheaper or something a little bit more expensive so first let's go
over some of the main features and specs that may interest you in the motherboard like this
first it's going to support ryzen 5000 and ryzen 3000 cpus this motherboard will pretty
easily handle even something like what i have in here right now and that's going to be the 16 core
ryzen 5950x other important features will include pcie generation 4. now as it pertains to the gpu
generation 4 really not that big of a difference as opposed to being limited to just pcie
generation three maybe in some use cases if you have like a 30 90 maybe doing some professional
workloads you may notice a difference but at the current time the difference between three and
four really nothing that you should worry about and yes pcie generation 5 is out on the current
crop of intel motherboards from alder lake but that's really not that big of a difference when
it comes to the gpu where you will notice more of a difference with pcie generation 4 however
is when you're actually trying to saturate those pcie lanes primarily with nvme drive generation
four depending on the drive that you have should be significantly faster than a generation three
drive if you can actually feel that in real world performance without benchmarks that's really going
to be up to the individual user but if you're transferring files in between drives maybe you
have other internal drives that are equally as fast otherwise it's not really a big deal
something that may be a positive or perhaps a negative if you want to future proof the x570
hero will have ddr4 and as opposed to ddr5 that's recently come out
on the newer motherboard such as the z690 from intel ddr4 is going to be a lot easier to find
it's going to be a lot cheaper in pretty much every single case and it's also much more mature
working with various different motherboards now ddr5 is the new standard but it's going to be
much more expensive on average and at least with the early kits the amount of performance that you
get versus the previous generation really isn't anything particularly too impressive
it's pretty much like pcie generation five on the networking side things to keep in mind there is
a wi-fi version and a non-wi-fi version of this board if you do get the wi-fi version it's going
to be wi-fi six and of course you are gonna get 2.5 and one gigabit lan now you're not going to
get 10 gigabit lan on a board like this that's why the pricing tier goes the way that it goes
after all that's how really these boards are segmented really by these more expensive features
now one of my favorite features on motherboards especially when they start to get higher end and
above that's going to be having the duals bios with a bios button on the back as well as clear
cmos on the back this makes things much easier in case you have an issue with your bios and
you need to reset it you need to try something else maybe you were overclocking and something
went wrong or something with a driver or update and it's one of the differentiators between a
higher end motherboard and something that's going to cost a little cheaper another feature that i
find really useful is having a start button on the motherboard or the power button now this is going
to be very handy when you're initially building your computer even if you have it on a test bench
i always tell people test your hardware before you put it in the case it'll be a lot easier to
diagnose if something is wrong or maybe something is shorting if you have it outside of the case it
might be harder to connect the power button to it from your case so having access to a physical
start button makes things much easier in case you ever need it in terms of connectivity in the back
of course if you have the wi-fi version you're gonna have your wi-fi antenna usb connectivity
is actually pretty amazing on this motherboard you're gonna have around 12 in the back one of
them is going to be a type c usbc i've seen some high-end motherboards that don't even have this
many so that's certainly very impressive now it is going to be missing thunderbolt 3 or thunderbolt
4. you're going to want to go to a higher end intel board or very select x570 motherboards do
offer thunderbolt but those generally are going to be considerably more expensive and just a higher
tier that's going to be one of the differentiators once again from those and the motherboard like
this audio connectivity for the motherboard is also fully featured you can have access to all
the ports in the back for storage drive support you're gonna get two m.2 slots as well as eight
sata ports now many more modern motherboards do have a considerable more amount of m.2 ports only
having two m.2 slots may be frustrating for some who want to have this as a workstation motherboard
but typically for gaming it should be more than enough especially with having eight different
sata ports for traditional ssds so what's the main difference between the x570 hero and the x570 dark
hero well there aren't too many of course the aesthetics and the actual design is going to be
different and one of the main differences the dark hero is not going to have a chipset fan
some people complain that this fan is a little bit too loud on most x570 models so the newer ones
tried to remove those fans while trying to keep vrm temperatures around the same and the dark hero
successfully does that no fan at all in sight now the only other important upgrade to mention it's
going to have about a 90 amp power delivery instead of 60 amp on the regular x570 hero
shouldn't really make that big of a difference even for like a 5950x but depending on how far
you want to take your overclock then i think you may actually notice a difference let's talk about
the value proposition realistically putting into context with what's going on in the market now
this motherboard originally was around 379 dollars and you're gonna find the dark hero variant maybe
for 449 on average it's going to be around that difference if you can find them for a similar
price of course you may want to step up to the dark hero which is just going to have better power
stages no chipset fans it's going to be you know slightly a newer version of the x570 hero if you
can get it for a reasonable price differential and especially if you're going to be using the ryzen
9 like a 5900x or a 5950x that slight increase in power delivery could allow you to perhaps
overclock a little bit better but if you're going to be using anything else and you don't want to
spend the extra money on the dark hero there really isn't a major difference especially if
you're going to be going with maybe a ryzen 7 and below x570 hero is going to be able to handle that
without any problems it will also handle the ryzen 9 of course you just get a little bit more oomph
out of the dark hero version and as far as the chipset fan is concerned i mean it is a good idea
not having a chipset fan for noise reasons but with various bios updates you're not going to
be able to control the fan on the x570 hero you should be able to keep it where it's not going to
be too audible especially if it's in the case or something like that do keep in mind that when the
x570 hero first came out ryzen 3000 was the main cpu from amd and that was of course superseded
by ryzen 5000 the only reason this may cause an issue some very early motherboards that never
got a bios update could potentially have an issue booting into ryzen 5000 i remember when ryzen 5000
first came out i had to first update the bios on this x570 hero and of course since the dark hero
came out at a much later date generally you should have out of the box compatibility with ryzen 5000
now the x570 hero the value proposition in 2022 one thing is clear motherboards
have been getting more and more expensive and if you find this at the original msrp let's say 379
compare that to the z690 hero which is you know ddr5 pcie generation 5. because of these new
technologies the prices have therefore on the same models increased a considerable amount so in one
way it does make this particular motherboard a good value proposition especially when you
consider the cpus have gone down in price for example the ryzen 5950x was for a very long time
750 or even more when it was really hard to get now sometimes you can find it for as low as 500
to 550 dollars and of course same a whole true for the 5800x 5900x 5600x all of the ryzen 5000 have
experienced a pretty nice drop in price meaning that even though this motherboard is a little bit
older it's going to be able to have a very potent cpu for a fairly significant savings in discount
when you consider the price of the motherboard as well as the cheaper cpus that are available now
and judging by what's available with z690 on intel you are gonna be missing of course the
next generation features like pcie generation five dvd r5 but as we've mentioned right now those are
really diminishing returns and there's not a huge impact with those type of technologies most likely
newer processors to come out as well probably will just have better multi-core performance and better
gaming performance through having higher clock speeds better ipc those things likely will all
ring true but at the end of the day much like the intel platform those prices should be considerably
more expensive than what you can get an x570 motherboard for now so that certainly makes a
pretty good argument for the x570 hero as a decent value proposition considering all of the price
decreases alright guys so i hope you enjoyed this look at the x570 hero as well as the dark hero let
me know if you have any questions down below and remember to subscribe for more content like this