Introduction

We've seen a few ROG Glacial motherboards from ASUS over the years, and they never fail to impress. Icy white, designs, extreme cooling hardware whether it's heatsinks or water blocks and unique cutting-edge features. Till now, we've not seen this extreme high-end and drool-worthy range land on any AMD sockets, but this all changes with the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial.

This is for good reasons of course. Intel has, in the past, been the performance king and the big seller and companies bet big on the LGA1851 socket. Most of us know what happened next, with AMD X3D being by far the better option for gamers and the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial is also not the first Intel-exclusive model to make this move for this reason either. It's a home run for AMD, but all that is beside the point.



What we have here is quite possibly the most desirable, most extreme and best-looking AMD motherboard we've ever seen. In typical ultra high-end fashion, the ROG Crosshair X870E Glacial has some wild features and many may well travel down the motherboard ranks in the way we've seen in the past such as integrated I/O shields, to become mainstream. The engineering on show here is fabulous and of course it comes with an equally fabulous price tag. This is just as much a homage to PC hardware design as it is a review, but as usual we'll be taking our usual deep dive into its features and design to see if it performs as good as it looks.

Specifications

Packaging and Contents

As you'd expect and as we've also seen on competing boards recently, the packaging is exquisite with Apple-like finesse and plenty of fanfare in terms of revealing the motherboard. If we'd just dropped a thousand bucks on this motherboard ASUS can check this off in terms of the unboxing experience.


A neat addition to the usual dual layer design is a pull-out drawer that reveals a packed accessory tray with some familiar items, and newcomers too. Given the board's huge weight, this is actually quite useful as you don't want to be lifting it out of its enclosure every time you reach for an accessory.



Key takeaways here are a ROG Hyper M.2 Card that can provide a home to two PCIe Gen 5 SSDs that can run at full speed if you're prepared to sacrifice some GPU lanes, a Q-DIMM.2 module that offers two PCIe Gen 4 M.2 ports and installs into its own slot next to the DIMM slots, a cable-free memory fan, and a bunch of splitter cables for fans and RGB lighting.

The full list of accessories includes:

• 1× Wi-Fi antenna
• 2× SATA cables
• 1× Wi-Fi antenna
• 1× ROG Hyper M.2 Card
• 1x ROG Q-DIMM.2
• 1× 4-way 3-pin ARGB splitter cable
• 1× 2-way 3-pin ARGB splitter cable
• 2× 3-way 4-pin fan cables
• 1× M.2 pad package for ROG Hyper M.2 Card
• 1× Thermal pad for ROG Hyper M.2 Card
• 1× M.2 pad package for ROG Q-DIMM.2
• 2× Thermal pad for ROG Q-DIMM.2
• 1× Thermal pad for M.2 22110
• 7× M.2 backplate rubber packages
• 1× M.2 Q-Slide package
• 1× ROG Memory Q-Fan
• 1× Q-connector
• 1× ROG logo plate sticker
• 1× ROG stickers
• 1× ROG VIP card
• 1× ROG Bottle Opener
• 1× Quick start guide