Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To start, I am an Enthusiast benchmarker on hwbot.org, at one point I was #14 in the US Enthusiast (air/watercooled) league, and nearly broke top 100 worldwide, with over 75 cups and medals as well as 40 gold cups at one point. So a competitive benchmarker and overclocker. I am also a highly respected user of overclock.net with over 300 reputation points. I have been overclocking since 1998. I have also pretty much used exclusively ASUS and Republic of Gamers mainboards since I have been building, and have owned and overclocked and configured: ROG Crosshair V Formula, ROG Strix Z170H, ROG Strix Z270H, ROG Maximus VI Hero, and now this ROG Crosshair VIII Hero. To say I know what I'm doing, well, I don't believe the problems I am constantly having are a result of user error. Additionally, I went to school for IT, have Cisco certification for repairing PCs, laptops and printers, and achieved a 4.0 for the entirety of my degree. This is the worst ASUS or ROG product I have ever used, and until they fix this board, the bugs, the slowness in the OS, and get their stuff together, I will not be recommending or using their motherboards and will be warning users in the communities I visit, reddit, Twitter etc. to avoid this product and all ASUS ROG products I'll be fair and say that the construction of the motherboard itself is very solid, impressive with a brushed metal finish, the VRMs are best in class, the Daisy Chain topology for memory overclocking has allowed me to achieve very high memory overclocks at low timing, and it runs my R9 3900X at high clocks easily, while staying cool. As far as overclocking goes, and the features provided through the BIOS, I have no issues. However, there are NUMEROUS issues that have caused me to have to reinstall Windows 10 numerous times, that are totally unacceptable. Today, for example, the AURA lighting program and service are throwing an error, I have been reinstalling them all morning with no luck- and because I liked the lighted HERO logo on the board, I purchased a Phanteks Digital RGB 5050 kit. Just 5 days ago or so, I opened AURA and it worked fine. No configuration changes to my system were made in that time. Now, upon opening the program, it says "The Aura lighting service is not running"", when services.msc clearly says that the service is on and running, as well as their "AsusUpdateCheck" background service that you cannot terminate (I generally block this in my firewall..). I am using the standalone AURA software from the support section of ASUS website, which is no longer available for download, that was present on the release of the motherboard. (Again, it worked fine on Windows 10 Pro 1909 with all updates until...today) I even tried installing their terrible, buggy, rootkit, data collection software "Armoury Crate" that they are trying to push on everyone. Because it has AURA in the app. This "program" is a universal Windows application (read: a Win10 app) that runs around 8 services always running I counted in the background (for what purpose I do not know), has a EULA you have to agree to that mentions data collection, and also installs a rootkit service called "ROGSLLiveInstaller" (or something like that), that does not get removed when you uninstall Armory Crate and all the junk it installs, and constantly tries to reinstall all this spyware nonsense if you leave the service enabled. I have used Microsoft Autoruns, Ccleaner uninstaller, looked through Group Policy and Task Scheduler, and have found no way to remove this service. Oh, and yeah, even though the app has AURA control built into it, it didn't work there either- it just said "No Aura Devices Found" (really? There's AURA lighting built into the mainboard I/O cover). Too bad I bought some fancy Phanteks blinkenlights and can't use them! Moreover, it gets worse: the boot times with a brand new, fully up-to-date firmware, Samsung 970 Evo gen3 M.2 drive are horrendously slow. I run a dual boot of Linux (because who really would use Windows 10 if you know how to use Linux- I have Win10 solely for gaming), have OtherOs enabled in BIOS, have tried Fast Boot on and off, the Secure Boot keys were erased, as Linux generally needs all this done, and Windows 10 "Updates" will erase GRUB on your boot partition. Anyway, when I first got the board and set up a dual boot, boot times for Windows 10 were what I consider slow (20 seconds), however around a month and a half ago they suddenly became much longer for no explainable reason. On the order of 70 seconds (a minute plus). I have read that this is some kind of known issues with Windows 10, X570, and specifically the Ryzen 3900x processor. Unfortunately, AMD and Asus have essentially decided that they will only release drivers for the NVMe and USB 3 support for Windows 10, and not Windows 7, or I would simply return to that. Additionally, not only are the boot times atrocious, but the desktop is slow too- it feels like I am running Windows off an old mechanical hard drive. Seriously, I have a Macintosh SE (1986) I repaired and restored with a 400kb floppy drive and that thing boots off a floppy disk and opens programs faster than this brand new build. What the heck. What did I spend over $1400 on? Programs open slow, navigating explorer is slow, shutting down or rebooting is slow. I still have a box that has an FX-8350 and Crosshair V Hero, DDR3-2400 and a Samsung 850 Evo running Windows 7 x64 fully updated (my old setup from 2011)- it boots Windows 7 in about 3 seconds after the POST screen with the flying colored orbs, all the startup programs load in about 5 seconds from logging in, there is no 5-10 second delay when opening programs, etc. The odd thing is that the install of Linux on the M.2 boots in about 2 seconds flat and upon login loads everything basically instantly, uses around 1300mb less RAM (well, this is a Windows thing) including multiple conky widgets, etc. etc. Programs open instantly with no delay. But I cannot game on Linux. So for the last three months instead of gaming, benchmarking (which can crash a lot causing you to reboot, and if it takes over a minute to boot it is essentially tedious and not worth doing), and so forth I have reinstalled Windows 8 times, including once since it started taking forever to boot up (made literally no difference and took 2 days because of installing drivers etc.). Now I will most likely be reinstalling again since AURA stopped working for no reason I can determine, including hours reinstalling, troubleshooting using reddit/Google and other users posts (which I also did to fix the slow Win10 boot times to no avail, for basically 2 weeks straight before reinstalling), pouring through Event Viewer and log files, and so on. Finally, the boards BIOS was a mess. With the earliest bios versions for this board (0702 I believe), there was a bug that would silently corrupt your Windows install until you could no longer boot and would BSOD. They fixed that, but then there was the boost fiasco. On top of that, it was the laziest ROG BIOS launch I have ever seen- previous platforms had color-coded voltages (white for safe, yellow for high, pink for risky and red for LN2-level voltages). They've added this now but for the first few BIOS revisions all the voltages stayed white no matter what. Every other ROG board I've had had this feature to begin with. The layout of the BIOS is poor, all of the Advanced AMD CBS settings for overclocking that are shown in Ryzen DRAM Calculator need to be moved and exposed through the main Extreme Tweaker menu. Finally, a user told me that the Crosshair VII and Crosshair VI (x470 and x370 chipsets) used to have Boot DRAM Voltage, and this new board does not. Those allowed you to install Windows 7 if you wished, as well. Bottom line: unless you want to be spied on by Armoury Crate and have it consume a bunch of system resources in the background, have a slow and buggy NVMe implementation, have formerly working services and programs suddenly stop functioning, etc. look elsewhere. I paid $1400 for a system that is faster in synthetic benchmarks than real world use. I miss my Maximus VI + delidded SL binned 4790k @ 4.9GHz, but it's sold now. I don't know if the other vendors boards are better with Ryzen 3000 but I doubt it. I can't return the board now and don't want to rip my system apart. So I'm stuck with a slow, buggy, malfunctioning board Specs: Ryzen 9 3900x @4.4GHz CCD0, 4.2GHz CCD1, ~1.360v 16GB G.skill Flare X 3200MHz 14-14-14-34 @ 3800MHz c16-16-16-16-32-48 (B-Die Single Rank), 1900MHz IFclk 970 Evo pcie 3.0 m.2 WD Black 2TB, WD Blue 4TB, WD Blue 6TB (SATA III), Samsung 840 Evo (SATA III) EVGA GTX 1080ti FTW3 SLI COOLERMASTER V1000 PSU (Seasonic) Corsair H100i v2 w/ Arctic Bionix F120 fans