ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO Testing On Ubuntu 18.04 Linux

For those in the market for an AMD X570 high-end motherboard for use with the new Zen 2 processors, the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO was one of the boards sent out as part of the reviewer's kit and it's been working out quite well.

The ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO is quite feature packed with dual M.2 drives, USB 3.2 Gen2, active chipset heatsink, 2.5 Gbps Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet (requires kernel patches for the 2.5G controller), and plenty of other connectivity. This motherboard does cost a pretty penny though at around $380 USD.

The ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO has been working out well in our tests sans the Linux systemd/RdRand issue that will soon see a new BIOS release with the fix in place.

This motherboard has also been working out well in the testing we've done so far with FreeBSD 12.

As some reviewers have found some performance differences between the pre-release/reviewer BIOS and the latest production BIOS now available for the Zen 2 launch, I did run some Linux tests. At least in the case of this ASUS motherboard, there hasn't been much of a performance difference between the two BIOS revisions:

It's usually a few percent swing if that in either direction, but the older BIOS was favored in a number of cases.

This may be due to Linux differences around the CPU frequency scaling driver and other kernel factors compared to Windows, but I am currently carrying out more BIOS tests on different AMD X570 motherboards. This Linux BIOS comparison testing from the VIII HERO in full can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result file.

There's another week of interesting Zen 2 benchmarks coming up on Phoronix.