The missing crosshair VII

Jurrunio · November 6, 2019

As we all know, pure-bred ROG boards like the Maximus, Rampage and Zenith typically comes with multiple variants (aside from the Dominus Extreme, LGA3647 doesn't need cut-down boards for obvious reasons) say the Hero, Code, Formula, sometimes the Gene and Impact. Wonder why on X470 Asus only released the Crosshair VII Hero in the family to the public? Even the X370 Crosshair VI gets both the Hero and Extreme, and those came before Ryzen's big success? Apparently there's indeed the Crosshair VII Extreme planned, as someone who works in Asus posts pictures for the board

Spoiler

Now this picture explains a lot about why it got shutdown by the financial department. It's the PLX chip, very expensive ($150-300 each if you buy them in bulk of 100-300 units in digikey, so even Asus is likely paying $100 each for truck-loads of them), not very useful when you could just buy a Threadripper and get actual lanes rather than a clever switch. There's also DIMM.2, extra USB headers and overclocking buttons in a place Buildzoid @AHOC will appreciate, but seems like with the PLX chip it's too expensive for even Asus to sell. This is the company btw that managed to get away with selling the Crosshair VIII Formula by tacking on a fancy screen, a VRM waterblock that's completely unnecessary for the heat it produces, still active chipset cooling with a small fan, and 2.5G LAN, for over 50% higher price than the Hero.

VRM wise it seems to use the same 5x2 (yes Asus still using doublers back then) IR3555 core power scheme + 2x IR3555 for SOC power as the Hero, but as it's an engineering sample board (and somewhat blurry picture) it's totally possible that Asus planned something else for the Hero at that time or the ones on this board are actually TDA21472 (the are similarly sized)