Asus has announced its first-ever ROG Apex motherboard for AMD CPUs. The ROG Crosshair X870E Apex is Asus' all-new extreme overclocking-focused motherboard, aimed at CPU overclocking and extreme DDR5 memory overclocking. Overclocker Safedisk has already achieved eight world records with the Apex by overclocking two G.Skill DDR5 memory sticks to over DDR5-10000.
The new board has an E-ATX form factor and supports all AM5 Ryzen-based CPUs: the Ryzen 7000 series, Ryzen 8000 series (APUs), and Ryzen 9000 series. The defining trait of the Apex series is the DIMM slot count, which drops from four to just two. This maximizes DDR5 overclocking potential, as fewer DIMM slots enable board makers to improve the traces connecting each slot to the CPU.
Asus advertises a "minimum" overclocking window of "8200+ MT/s" for Ryzen 9000 CPUs, "9600+MT/s" for Ryzen 8000 CPUs, and "8000+ MT/s" for Ryzen 7000 CPUs for CPUs and memory kits listed in the board's CPU/Memory support list.
The board features all the bells and whistles of an Asus extreme overclocking motherboard featuring 18 110A, two 110A, and two 80A power stages with MicroFine alloy chokes and premium SMD capacitors. Asus' plethora of CPU overclocking-focused technologies, such as Dynamic OC Switcher, Core Flex, and Asynchronous clock, are also present, on top of AMD's overclocking features courtesy of Precision Boost Overdrive.
Operating on the X870E chipset, the new Crosshair Apex has a robust assortment of I/O and PCIe connectivity. The board comprises dual PCIe 5.0 slots, one PCIe 4.0 x4 slot, and one PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. Three M.2 slots are on the board, running at PCIe 5.0 speeds. I/O consists of dual USB4 (40Gbps) Type-C ports, six USB 10Gbps ports, five Type-A connectors, and one Type-C connector. Rounding out the rear I/O USB ports are two USB Type-A 5Gbps ports.
The front I/O is almost as numerous, consisting of dual USB 20 Gbps ports, one of which features 60W power delivery and Quick Charge 4+ support, two USB 5Gbps headers supporting four additional USB 5 Gbps ports, and two USB 2.0 headers supporting up to four additional 2.0 ports. There is also a Wi-Fi 7 card (with Bluetooth 5.4 support) for internet connectivity and a single Realtek 5 Gbps Ethernet port.
Like other ROG boards, the Apex has a black finish with RGB LED accents. Covers cover most of the board, including the PCIe slots, M.2 slots, and the rear I/O area.
Professional overclocker Safedisk achieved eight new records with the Crosshair X870E Apex paired to a Ryzen 9 9950X and a 48GB DDR5 G.Skill memory kit overclocked to DDR5-10200 on air cooling. Safedisk scored 17,0757 points in Geekbench 3 multi-core, 324,364 MIPS in 7-Zip, 9,372 points in R15, 23,585 points in R20, 60,868 points in R23, a time of 17s 498ms in GPUPI for CPU 1B, 316.969 FPS in HWBot x265 benchmark at 1080p, and 78.319 FPS in HWBot x265 benchmark at 4k.
Crosshair X870E Apex will be available in the first quarter of this year. Pricing, however, remains a mystery.
