Asus not done with ROG 20th anniversary - ROG Crosshair X870E Edition 20

https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-crosshair-x870e-edition-20/

Hot on the heels of their throwback Crosshair 2006 model, ROG is offering a new motherboard to commemorate the anniversary - The Crosshair X870E Edition 20. As someone who had their phenomenal X99 chipset "Rampage V Edition 10" motherboard working for just shy of a decade, I'm curious to see how the Edition 20 stacks up. Where the Crosshair 2006 was built on the Dark Hero, the Edition 20 is predicated on the Glacial - the highest end offering in the Crosshair AM5 lineup's mid-generation refresh. Unlike the Glacial's white aesthetic (a nice change for a top of the line board), the Edition 20 has a predominantly black and gold aesthetic with red accents; a style that seems to be consistent with the rest of the Edition items such as a new 5090 Astral Edition 20 , monitor, router, mouse, keyboard, and even chairs and luggage apparently.

One of the hallmark features is that the mobo is sold as a bundle alongside a specially modified ROG Ryujin 360 Edition AIO cooler, which shares the color scheme on its fans and the like, but has an enhanced Asetek pump, a 40mm thick radiator and other changes, supposedly leading to a 10% (for CPU) to 50% (for PCB and MOSFET) temp decrease using their other flagship mobo (Glacial) and cooler (Ryujin III 360). In contrast to the Ryujin III 360 's smaller 3.5" LCD, the Edition 20's has 6.67" curved "swivel dual" AMOLED displays which seem to nearly take up the entire top of the mobo, visually. The mobo, along with a ton of Glacial inherited features like the Q-DIMM2 (a feature I've found very useful on my X670E Extreme that allows you to mount 2 M.2 SSDs in a DIMM-like slot, neither one threatening to undermine bandwidth to other slots). With 2 PCI-E 5.0 x16 slots and apparently capability to hold 9 M.2 devices (thanks to the aforementioned Q-DIMM2, plus a Hyper M.2 card that you can plug into a PCI-E slot) seems impressive, but (incoming old man rant) I do wish it had a full compliment of PCI-E x16 slots and more importantly the lanes to make use of them; the longer these platforms go on with pushing more hardware/performance with need for PCI-E lanes and RAM bandwidth it is stranger to see chipsets not evolve to expand both of them. However, I digress. Its worth noting that the motherboard also is apparently using a full copper VRM heatsink, unlike the aesthetic given to the Crosshair 2006 which apparently annoyed a few for only having the appearance of being copper.

As of yet there's no price listed I've seen, but given the Glacial's $1300-ish price, and the inclusion of the new cooler I expect $1500+. The Crosshair 2006 only being a modest $100 more than its Dark Hero more common counterpart lets hope holds here as well as opposed to Asus deciding they're going to push the exclusivity and expense much higher for this flagship board. Guess we shall see how things evolve...

I'll buy expensive motherboards, but this is ridiculous.

Given they already have a 360 AIO CLC with a screen at 420-430 USD I imagine it'll be at least $2k.

I still don't get what the point of the expansion slot area cover is with this and the glacial, if you want to use a slot you have to remove it.

landing page for the rest of the stuff: https://rog.asus.com/content/rog-edition-20/

D-EJ915 said:

Given they already have a 360 AIO CLC with a screen at 420-430 USD I imagine it'll be at least $2k.

I still don't get what the point of the expansion slot area cover is with this and the glacial, if you want to use a slot you have to remove it.

landing page for the rest of the stuff: https://rog.asus.com/content/rog-edition-20/

Click to expand...

Wow, I didn't think the AIOs would be that expensive especially when most of them are based on similar Asetek designs (admittedly, this one seems to be as well but has a number of modifications they're talking about), so it often comes down to either aesthetics (like displays, RGB etc), fans, and the like. Sometimes design differs, notably with Arctic's Liquid Freezer series that has different builds than most of the Asetek OEM including a thicker radiator) but last I checked many AIOs have been getting better and cheaper across the line, but I'm guessing some may have a significant premium for the aesthetic features - like displays I'm guessing - rather than overall performance. This reminds me, on the Edition 20 cooler, I'm really hoping that a "Dual 6.67 inch" set of AMOLEDs can be interacted with properly rather than relying on some proprietary software exclusively. The OLED on my X670E Extreme works well without any specific software, at least displaying temps and other stuff direct from the UEFI settings, but its a much smaller and b/w display. With something larger and in color, it would be nice if it had not just all those functions and built in graphics noted on the page, but has a USB-C DisplayPort or similar connector. They do talk about "display sync-up mode" which would be nice if it was detected as an actual monitor, but it could also come down to some sort of software-heavy proxy to handle mirroring without it being detected as an actual secondary monitor. For something of this size and likely expense though, full functionality should be at the forefront - not something dependant on Armoury Crate or the like, exclusively.

As far as the expansion slot area cover, you're absolutely right its kind of silly to have it cover everything including the first PCI-E x16 slot. Looking at the Glacial page, apparently these are magnetic, aesthetic covers that can be removed or even hung elsewhere when not in use. If like Glacial, once you take off the pictured magnetic plate, both PCI-E x16 slots are exposed and there's another separate cover for the M.2 drives in the area between them which acts as a heatsink; I'm guessing like on my Extreme there are thermal pads below that can help interface with the heatsink-intended main cover. But yeah, the magnetic cover is kind of a neat aesthetic feature but if they already omitted the first M.2 slot cooler, they could have at least made a cutout for the first PCI-E x16 slot knowing that anyone buying this kind of motherboard is going to put a graphics card (likely a pretty powerful one, with a thick cooler including their own 5090 Astral) in said slot, necessitating removal of the cover!