Release date : 01 Mar 2026
US MSRP      : 1,300 USD   
EU MSRP      : 1,100 EUROS 
Comp.        : RYZEN 7000
               RYZEN 8000
               RYZEN 9000
CPU Socket   : AM5 LGA1718 (AMD)
Chipset      : X870E (AMD)
PCIe Lanes   : x24 PCIe 5.0 (CPU)
               x12 PCIe 4.0 (PCH)
               x8  PCIe 3.0 (PCH)
SATA         : x4 SATA III
USB 4.0      : x2 BACK IO
USB 3.2 (2x2): x2 Front Panel 60W
USB 3.2 (2x1): x11 BACK IO
WIFI 7       : MediaTek MT7927 

 

If you thought that the Extreme was as high as the ROG Team could go, think again. Through its brand new Neo lineup of motherboards, ASUS took the opportunity to make the most outlandish, expensive single motherboard seen in 2026.

We’re reviewing the excellent, imposing, and humbling ROG CROSSHAIR X870E GLACIAL—a board unapologetically shoving our expectations aside and bringing in a mosaic of innovative engineering risks.

DESIGN

The Glacial is a chameleon. Naked of equipment is where you’ll find it fully dressed; every part, every opening, and every connector is covered by gorgeous magnetized plating. It imposes a gorgeous metallic ROG eye contrasting with a stunning ocean of reflection.

 

The entire board plating, side to side, is seating on large magnets, and can be removed.

The plates are seating securely thanks to rather powerful magnets.

The result is striking. The naked GLACIAL is almost as beautiful than fully dressed.

However, this modular concept partially pays off. While front-facing plugs are angled, connectors on the left side can interfere with the magnetized plates, which sit awkwardly on the plugs.

However, ASUS did provide some extra magnetized column to fit between the side-plate and the board to allow more room for the cables.

However, having these connectors made in a 90 degree angle would have avoided the problem to start with.

OLED Screen

One of the most striking feature of the GLACIAL is this gorgeous, high resolution 5 inch, 2.5K, OLED screen which will feed you with a bunch of CPU / GPU related metrics whiles animating different aesthetically driven scenes.

To be noted, only the EXTREME and GLACIAL feature such advanced design feature.

RGB

RGB wise, the GLACIAL stays sober, and refrained from any tacky embedded LED. Instead it leaves to the user’s taste the management of all the its LED dressing through x3 ARGB 2.0 connectors.

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PCB

We are dealing with a large E-ATX, solid 8 server-graded, ultra-low loss, PCB layered motherboard.

This is the absolute best for signal insulation in such a bandwidth-rich environment utilizing notoriously signal-bleeding PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 standards.

In addition, the back is protected by an impressive aluminum backplate which, thanks to 7W thermal pads, doubles as a heat-plate for the VRM and chipset.

About the best foundation available in the industry today!

VRM Architecture

To be clear, we are dealing with THE most powerful power solution available on a retailed motherboard.

VRM ARCHITECTURE : 

The GLACIAL VRM powers three segments of the motherboards.

1. CPU (the one people usually focuses on the most) and controlled but a dedicated PWM Controller.
2. MISC_RAIL ( V_MISC / VDD_MISC ) powers PCIe Lanes, IO connectivity and Internal Sensors.
3. SOC_RAIL powers the iGPU and control RAM voltage.

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We have reached a sun-melting 3,000 amps worth of power solution on a mainstream motherboard.

This is beyond what you will ever need, but it provides some thermal management since you will reach CPU clock limits way before utilizing 50% of these mammoth 110A power stages, thus somewhat limiting the heat produced, which is still very substantial.

VRM Cooling

ASUS delivered the best cooling solution in existence! We have a two-segment cooling apparatus

On its own it is a beautiful peace of condensed 6063 graded aluminum  ( Thermal Conductivity: ~200-201 W/m·K ) .

The main VRM block is rather large, and despite not having much “winglets” to increase its radiating surface, shows off thicker wall to store harvested heat. Great to slow down the movement of heat on its way to the radiating roof.

Under the OLED screen we can find a rather small radiating roof ( in red on the picture ), but does a rather good job at dissipating heat nevertheless.

The side block, albeit showing some strong density qualities, is a little more slimmer than usually , and, as we will see later, gets significantly hotter than its main VRM block sibling.

One rather important novelty here : both of our segments are linked by two 8mm wide copper pipes, instead of typically one, to ensure a perfectly homogeneous heat spread.

Both of our segments show Double Contact Designs, allowing a direct, thermal-padded contact, to both Powers Stages and Chokes alike.

VRM Temps

CPU chosen for the test is a RYZEN R9 9900X, 12 Cores, with 6 Performance Cores set at 5.7 GHz, and 6 E-Cores set at 5.375 GHz

My Ryzen 9 9900X barely managed to warm the block surfaces, with temps staying way below the 50°C limit. However, despite a double copper pipe linkage, I will mention a noticeable temperature delta between the main and side block, Nothing really important, at this stage, but it does underline the copper pipe technique limitations in terms of heat spread.

From the VRM architecture, componentry menu, quality of cooling elements, and delivery control, ASUS absolutely aced it.
An obvious good for everything and anything power solution, which will be most profitable for content creators and other 3D rendering tasks.

I cannot give this anything less than an unprecedented 9.5 out of 10. Pair this with a Ryzen 9; anything else would be a waste of energy for the GLACIAL.

RAM

The GLACIAL supports the usual 256 GB of DDR5 RAM, organized ina dual channel configuration ( upto 64 GB per slot, 128 GB per channel ).
Maximal advertized data swap is 9,600 MTs which is only achievable in a single stick configuration.

Note that the GLACIAL, as in many of the higher ranking ROG motherboards, come with a clever resetting of the RAM slot plating, which does significantly reduce the “antenna effect” that higher voltage RAM can incidentally impose on them.

ASUS calls it “NITROPATH DRAM TECHNOLOGY”, which I will leave to my wise audience the privilege to enjoy.

But in application it DOES WORK, and even though it is difficult to appreciate the real data swap gain (in MT’s), I can safely bare witness, that it was easier on such equipped motherboard, to obtain 8,400 MTs on a dual RAM stick situation.

To obtain these higher data swaps, make sure to wisely choose your sticks and ensure they feature the Hynix M-DIE architecture, a must for higher voltage and data performances.

In our case, I went for my goto brand, PATRIOT, with their absolute performance monster : Patriot Viper Extreme 5 ( 24 GB x 2 )

STORAGE

ASUS saw thing in big, in very big. All medium and standards combined, the ROG CROSSHAIR X870E GLACIAL can support, simultaneously 11 Hard Drives.  Absolutely unprecedented.

 

• x4 SATA III  RX TX 6 Gbs
• x7 NVMs RX TX  from 32Gbs to 128 Gbs

SATA

The GLACIAL is one of very few premium boards which get a little bandwidth help and feature an additional bandwidth source, other than our traditional CPU / PCH combo.

Two SATA plugs ( in blue on the pictures ) as well as 1 of the 3.2 (2×2 20 Gbs) front panel plug are fed directly from their own bandwidth rich ASM1162 from ASMedia.

NVMe

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NVMe Cooling

In all cases, every single NVMe gets a luxurious double thermal padding treatment with thick thermal plates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what is, arguably, the most striking piece of hardware on this board, is the massive main NVMe cooler, which is simply massive.

Featuring a large copper pipe extracting harvested heat through a “steam” chamber.

The NVMe block towers above the GLACIAL, encapsulating a heavy piece of dense aluminium, fed by our copper plate, hear visible on the picture.

Worth mentioning, the GLACIAL comes with magnetized PWM fan add-on which is here to keep our RAM and DIMM.2 cool at all time. Rather well thought.

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PCIe Bifurcation

Thanks to the supplementary “co-CHIPSET” we saw earlier ( ASM1162 ), the GLACIAL is less bandwidth starved than many of its competitors. And that reflect rather well on the PCIe mapping of the board, which guarantees all of its components dedicated bandwidth Lanes. Save one!

Our Secondary PCIe 5.0 NVMe and our back IO USB 4.0s do share 4 PCIe 5.0 Lanes. As shown above, out of the box, they are configured to share the lanes equally, availing half of the advertised bandwidth to them.

But, thought the BIOS, you can decide to sacrifice one of the two, and dedicate the entirety of the 4 PCIe 5.0 lanes to one rather than the other.

Again, this is the only bifurcation present on this over-equipped board, so a very good point for team ASUS.

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PCIe EXPORTS

From intensive gamer to content creator, the PCIe Export shows off the best there is in the industry today, and a bit more.

In a single GPU configuration, our closest Export to the GPU is the only one populated with 16 PCIe 5.0 lanes, for a 64 GBs worth of bandwidth each way.

In a DUAL GPU configuration, lanes are shared in a 8 by 8 configuration, giving us a still very  fast 32 FBs worth of bandwidth each way.

The best part is the DUAL GPU LOCKING MECHANISM. ASUS is the first one to do so.

A noticeable walk back from last year Trigger based PCIe express locking mechanism which did, at time, slightly scratch the GPU PCB ( after 80 removals ). A nothing burger scandal which has the merit of delivering about the best GPU locking mechanism I have seen in a decade. So no regrets!

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BACK IO

x4 USB 3.2 USB TYPE-C - RX TX : 10 Gbs
x8 USB 3.2 USB TYPE-A - RX TX : 10 Gbs
x2 USB 4.0 USB TYPE-C - RX TX : 40 Gbs
x2 LAN 10 GbE
WiFi 7 (Low latency 5.9 Gb/s, 320 MHz, 802.11be)
Audio: ALC 4082 with 3rd Gen Quad DAC

As everything else on the GLACIAL, the BACK IO is absolutely SPECTACULAR! We have upto 200 Gbs worth of USB based data swap, but most importantly , we got TWO 10 GBs LAN plugs, which I believe is a first!

Absolutely great for UGREEN NAS users in particular which offers the 10 Gb access to quickly pull and edit 4K files, AND still have access to a low latency 10 GBs fiber optic connection. Absolute insane.

The only caveat I have is the absence of classic HDMI or Display Port graphic output. Instead the GLACIAL relies on the USB 4 Display Port abilities, which is great and probably the way toward the future, but I find it is not very practical and a bit premature.

Audio wise, we have the best of what integrated solution can offer. An all digital ALC4082 codec, promoted by a 3rd gen. ESS^® ES9219 QUAD DAC, the whole filtered by 500 micro farads worth of solid capacitors.

Perfect for any premium usages, spanning from rich gaming environment, to static free content creation.

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FRONT PANEL CONNECTOR

x3 USB 2.0 USB TYPE-A - RX TX : 480 Mbs
x2 USB 3.1 USB TYPE-A - RX TX : 5 Gbs
x2 USB 3.2 (2x2) USB TYPE-C - RX TX : 20 Gbs - 60 Watts charging

Special kudos for the upto 60W charging of our type-C front panel connectors.

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COOLING

Probably one of my favorite part of this board, and a testimony on how daring ASUS can be.

This extra connector is called the AIO Q CONNECTOR and will feed compatible AIO water coolers with power, software and PWN fan instructions, removing the need of any wires. Probably the last cable-free grail in the PC building world.

And ASUS had absolutely no fear, splitting the PCB in two and injecting this connector in there. I absolutely love it

Here is a shot i took at CES 2026 ( LAS VEGA ) where I had the chance to see it first hand.

Worth mentioning, AIO Q CONNECTOR equipped boards can still accommodate classic AIO water coolers.

In a more classic registry we got ou usual PWM FANS and Water PUMP connectors for anything spanning from good air flow to a custom water cooling situation,
We even have a LN2 mode in the case you’d want to try your luck on a 3 grand an hour cooling solution :).

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BIOS

THe GLACIAL, as well as the entire NEO line-up of motherboard, benefit from ASUS first fully redesigned BIOS in a decade! And it looks great.

Higher resolution, nicer graphics, better mouse handling (finally) and much more sturdy backbone, ASUS new BIOS comes in on most of the new NEO line up and that is a bigger deal than you might think.

It departs in all the good ways from its older version but remains close enough to keep an intuitive sense to it. It might very well be that ASUS new BIOS is better than a lot of the windows based software it had released the past few years.

To support such a nice enhanced and redesigned BIOS, ASUS had to upgrade the storage chip, going from 32 to 64 MB chips, which, in the GLACIAL case, came in a pair, since you have a DUAL BIOS features, which will allow you to swap BIOS on the fly with a flip of a switch. I absolutely love it!

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TROUBLESHOOTING 

Obviously the GLACIAL comes with everything an uber premium board should come.

Apart form a somewhat awkwardly placed and partially hidden EZ DEBUGGER, we have 2 OLED error screen which will do a great job at pinpointing the exact reason why the board is facing problems.

Got to notice and command the large OLED screen which clearly refines our troubleshooting experience.

We also have a myriad of direct access buttons:

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CONCLUSION

 

The ROG CROSSHAIR X870E GLACIAL   retailing at approximately 1,300 USD in the US and 1,100 EUR in the EU, it is an incredibly expensive motherboard. The primary question is whether it is worth the investment.