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ASUS Maximus XII Hero (WiFi)

Black Haru

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ASUS once again delivers with their Maximus line of high-end motherboards. The Maximus XII Hero (WiFi) has premium looks, premium features, a powerful VRM and broad overclocking support. It terms of connectivity, everything is there, too: WiFi 6, 5 Gb/s LAN, triple M.2 slots.

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Just an FYI, when you're listing the board specs in the introduction, you list it as only 2x SATAIII 6Gb/s ports while in the board layout section, you specify 6x SATAIII ports.
 
Wow!

That's some price inflation for a Hero class board, I got one for my old 4690K build in 2014 and it only cost $165.

Motherboard prices have gone absolutely insane.
 
seems since x570 seemed to sell well they collectively figured they could charge an extra 100 "across the board" and get away with it.
 
$400 U.S. is about $800 AU.
No idea how that conversion works out, I think retailers and our Government think we have money to burn and they want it all.
 
Wow!

That's some price inflation for a Hero class board, I got one for my old 4690K build in 2014 and it only cost $165.

Motherboard prices have gone absolutely insane.

5Gb LAN and WiFi 6 aren't free. Nor is the thermal solution required to handle 250W of CPU heat output. And there's a little thing called "coronavirus" that has had a non-negligible impact on the supply chain.

But it hardly helps that enthusiasts demanded ridiculously unnecessarily overbuilt VRMs that have now become standard on almost every motherboard. Those aren't free either.
 
$400 gets you all the bells & whistles, an overbuilt VRM + cooler combo that can wrestle the i9-10900K without problems & looking cool at the same time. That said, Gigabyte's B550 AORUS Master costs nearly as much as this, so this Z490 chipset this board is using seemed a little better in value than the mid range, overbuilt B550 board.
 
$400 gets you all the bells & whistles, an overbuilt VRM + cooler combo that can wrestle the i9-10900K without problems & looking cool at the same time. That said, Gigabyte's B550 AORUS Master costs nearly as much as this, so this Z490 chipset this board is using seemed a little better in value than the mid range, overbuilt B550 board.
'Nearly as much' is quite a bit more. $280 vs $399.....

You're also comparing an enthusiast chipset to a midrange one where $280 is the most expensive B550 board out there.
 
Asus's support of the AMD 570 version of this board has been absolutely woeful. I have always owned Asus boards going back nearly 15 years, and after this experience, I don't think I will be re-visiting Asus anytime soon.

I expect a premium offering to have support that includes drivers and utilities which are not over six months old, with many not updated since launch, and meant for an earlier version of Windows, and a BIOS which has an old AGESA in it. How long has it been since AMD released the last AGESA, 2 months now, and still no update.

Be warned that if you have any issues with this board, then it may never get fixed, as Asus is on a release-it-and-forget-about-it campaign.
 
The RoG Tax has gotten insane..... we were strictly an Asus shop up until Z87 / Z97 at which point Asus was not only charging more but their performance dropped substantially below their competitors and their Tech Support / RAM process got farmed out to Pegatron (Parent company of their supossed competitor ASRock). While the brought the performance back up after Z97, there's nothing about Asus anymore that "stands out". No technical reason that I wouldn't buy Asus today, except for the RoG tax. And Asus still has the best BIOS available by a significant margin.

I think Id go with the MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X with built in MonoBlock for the same price.
 
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