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.
SpecificationsSpecificationsCPU Support:AMD Socket AM5 Ryzen 7000, 9000Power Design: CPU Power: 24-phase
SOC Power: 2-phase
MISC Power: 2-phase Chipset:AMD X870EIntegrated Graphics: Supported
2× DisplayPort via Type-C Memory: 4× DIMM, Support up to 256 GB
1× Single Rank DDR5-9600 (OC) BIOS:512 Mbit AMI UEFIExpansion Slots: 2× PCIe Gen 5 x16 slot (x16, x8/x8, x8/x4/x4, x4/x4/x4/x4) Storage: 4× SATA 6 Gb/s
4× M.2 (PCIe Gen 5 x4) (two via Hyper M.2 card)
2× M.2 (PCIe Gen 4 x4) (one via DIMM.2 card)
1× M.2 (PCIe Gen 4 x2) (one via DIMM.2 card) Networking: 2× Realtek 10 Gbps Ethernet
1× MediaTek MT7927 Wi-Fi 7 Rear Ports: BIOS Flashback button
CMOS clear button
2× 10 Gbps Ethernet
2× 40 Gbps USB4 Type-C
4× USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps (Type-C)
8× USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps (Type-A)
2× Wi-Fi antenna connectors
2× Audio jacks
1× Optical S/PDIF Out port Audio: 1× ROG SupremeFX Realtek ALC4082 Codec
1× ESS ES9219 Quad DAC Fan/Thermistor headers:8× 4-pin/1× 2-pinForm Factor: EATX Form Factor
  12.0 ×, 10.9 in/30.5 × 27.7 cm Exclusive Features:M.2 Q-LatchM.2 Q-ReleaseM.2 Q-SlidePCIe Q-Release SwitchQ-Antenna