Upon first meeting the Asus ROG Crosshair VII Hero Kitguru were impressed with the features and design of the board but underwhelmed by the performance.  After contacting ASUS they received a new BIOS and resumed testing, publishing their results here.   The board now performs admirably on the default settings, at the cost of an extra ~40W of power being consumed, while when manually clocked you can replicate the performance but without that extra power draw.

Kitguru explains how Synchronous and Asynchronous mode differ and how this relates to the extra power draw.  In Synchronous mode the CPU memory and PCIe all share the same clock signal while in Asynchronous mode the CPU clock can be adjusted without any effect on the memory or PCIe clocks.  Check out what they think this means for Ryzen users here.

"As we expected, the Crosshair VII Hero is a high end motherboard that is loaded with overclocking features and while it looks and feels really solid, our initial testing suggested that performance was nothing special."

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