A couple of months ago, the Taiwanese company Gigabyte showed the Z590 AORUS Xtreme Waterforce – an enthusiast motherboard with a water block that carries out cooling of the processor and power subsystem. The manufacturer did not announce the cost then, but it was assumed that it would be comparable to the price of the ROG Maximus XIII Glacial – the flagship motherboard from ASUS for $1,500. exceeded expectations and priced the AORUS Xtreme Waterforce at $1,600.
So what do we get for this amount? The first thing that catches your eye is a candy bar equipped with an indication of the temperature of the processor and water in the system. A backlit water block covers the CPU and VRM and further cools the chipset and NVMe SSD.
The novelty has a built-in leakage protection function, thanks to which the system automatically shuts down in case of problems. For better overclocking, the power subsystem uses a 20 + 1 phase with 100A cascades.
Also Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Xtreme Waterforce received:
- support for Intel 10th and 11th generation processors
- Support for dual-channel unbuffered DDR4 memory without ECC
- Intel TB 4
- AQUANTIA 10GbE LAN and Intel 2.5GbE LAN
- Wi-Fi 6E and BT 5 with two antennas
- audio codec with high-quality ESS SABER 9018K2M DAC and LME 49720, OPA1622, and WIMA audio capacitors
- RGB FUSION 2.0 backlight control system
The Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Xtreme Waterforce has become the most expensive consumer motherboard on the market. For its price, for example, you can buy three flagship Intel 11th generation Core i9-11900K processors.
