ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero Review

Conclusion

It’s not that we’ve been reviewing hardware for a long time, but we remember the 4th iteration of the ASUS ROG Maximus when it was on the P67 chipset, powering our Sandy Bridge CPUs. It seems that ASUS have dispensed with the numbering convention and left the chipset alone to carry the weight of which exact model of Maximus it is. Initially you used to have a choice between a Formula and an Extreme, but now you also can have, just like the Crosshair, a Hero model. The Hero was a recent addition to the ROG range, balancing all the features you would hope to find on a Republic of Gamers motherboard with a price that was on the sane side of their flagship ones.

So wildly popular did this prove that the feature creep is beginning and the newest ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero has got the looks and feature set one would normally associate with a model even higher up the ASUS food chain. It still has a couple of places where you can see they’re leaving room for an even more bedazzled model, but they are few and far between. That said, with an asking price of £669.99, PC builders should expect a lot from this motherboard.

The first thing you notice is the shininess. Both the M.2 heatsink and VRM heatsink are both covered with a mirrored finish smooth enough to shave in. If you’re the type of person who likes your RGB lighting to bath the whole system then the reflective nature of these will definitely assist in that endeavour. Next you spot the giant ROG Eye logo that adorns the top of this very page. We’ve seen a few takes on this recently and we’re fans of ASUS keeping it simple here and not using their awful glitch idea. Eye-dea? But of course we can’t live with just a glance, and the moment you pay attention to the details you spot all the things that allow the Maximus Hero to stand proud amongst its contemporaries. There are fan headers everywhere. Three front panel USB headers (two 3.2 G2 Type-A and one Type-C alongside the two USB 2.0 ones). Braced PCI Express slots. A gigantic VRM heatsink. Onboard start and reset. A dedicated waterpump header and flow monitoring. It’s got it all. It might seem a simple thing but the newly added PCI Express delatching button next to the DDR5 slots makes our job a breeze when stripping systems down.

Of course that’s all moot if the performance isn’t there but, like all the Maximus models before it, the newest Z790 Hero is a star, able to easily overclock our Core i9-13900K (no small feat) whilst also letting it be pushed hard when left to its own devices. If you’re feeling very brave and confident in your cooling setup, the BIOS even has a MultiCore Enhancement mode that is labelled “Remove All Limits”. If that doesn’t get the overclocker in you excited to have a one click way to reach new heights then we don’t know what will.

With a lot of the Z790 launch motherboards taking established brands in new directions there is something comforting about the ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Hero. It’s everything you expect it to be in terms of looks, features and performance. When the results are this good, why change? That’s exactly why it wins our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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