It is true that PC components come in both low-end, mid-range, and high-end with that a huge variety of prices. And in some cases, there are components that are worth a full PC. That is the case with the AORUS Z690 Xtreme WaterForce motherboard from Gigabyte. The motherboard is high-end or rather very high-end for the new Intel Alder Lake CPUs.
Many times a very high price is synonymous with extreme quality, and with this motherboard, you will hardly get a better one, as it costs almost $2200.
The board has a unique design where every nook and cranny is covered. It comes with a liquid cooling block on top of the LGA1700 socket with a display that shows hardware monitoring.
The motherboard supports DDR5 memory and has the fastest memory on the XMP 3.0 list which is DDR5-6666.
The AORUS Z690 Xtreme WaterForce is equipped with two PCIe Gen 5 x16 slots. If both slots are occupied, the second slot will run at x8. The motherboard offers four M.2 slots that support PCIe Gen 4 SSDs. As for rear panel connections, it offers multiple USB 3.2 Ethernet ports, ThunderBolt, 2.5G and 10G, and two WiFi antennas.
Gigabyte hasn’t officially announced when this model will be on sale, but it was found on Aussie that they are selling it for $3,000 AUD, which is about $2,191 USD. All indications are that the AORUS Z690 Xtreme WaterForce will be available in very limited quantities.