Gigabyte Launches a $900 Motherboard

If you want the best performing gaming rig money can buy, then you obviously need to start by spending a lot of money. Opting to buy Gigabyte's latest motherboard certainly opens the way for some serious overclocking and performance, but it takes your investment to a whole new level of ridiculos as it costs $900!

The Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce Motherboard was revealed today, and it's a behemoth of a board. Rather than an ATX configuration, this is a larger E-ATX board measuring around 12-by-13-inches in size. As well as supporting 9th and 8th Gen Intel Core processors and four DIMMS for dual channel DDR4 memory (up to 64GB), this board boasts a 16 phase IR digital VRM power management system sitting on an eight-layer printed circuit board (PCB) containing two copper PCBs.

Other features include Intel CNVi 802.11ac with 2x2 Wave 2 Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5, Intel i219v Gigabit LAN, Aquantia 10 Gigabit Base-T LAN, Thunderbolt 3, triple M.2 connectors (PCIe 3.0 x4) each with thermal guards, and is pre-fitted with an Aorus all-in-one monoblock to allow for easy watercooling setup. Audio is provided via an AMP-UP Audio system complete with "audiophile grade capacitors," there's front USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C, multi-zone addressable LED and RGB LED light strips, and Smart Fan 5 to allow for temperature sensors (two) and fan (16) monitoring/adjustment.

The main selling point for this motherboard seem to be the combination of overclocking potential with the pre-configured watercooling system. The monoblock design extends to cool the processor, chipset, power system, and the M.2 SSDs. To ensure peace of mind, Gigabyte built in a liquid leakage detection system that includes a "protective mechanism" which gets automatically triggered if a leak is detected to stop components being damaged.

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For overclocking, Gigabyte uses OC Touch and two BIOS chips, which allows incremental frequency adjustments of 1MHz or 0.1MHz without needing to reboot the system. There's also an OC Touch Connector on the motherboard allowing an OC Touch Panel to be hooked up, but it needs to be purchased separately. An OC button also allows for preset overclocks to be enabled for "less experienced overclockers."

As Tom's Hardware reports, the Aorus Xtreme Waterforce is expected to be available at Newegg from Dec. 21 carrying that hefty $899.99 price tag. I do wonder how many will sell and just how expensive the rigs they find their way into will be, especially considering they are being pushed for use with a $550 Core i9-9900K. That's a spend of $1,450 for just two of the required components!