Mainboards for current player hardware are available in all price ranges: From well under 100 dollars to well over 500 or 600 dollars, everything is included, even 1,000 dollars and more you get to see again and again.
The Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce However, it surpasses all of them – at least in terms of price. Because the flagship for the Comet Lake S and Rocket Lake S processors (Core i 10000 and Core i 11000) from Intel will cost over 2,000 dollars according to the well-known Europe extreme overclocker and YouTuber Roman “der8auer” Hartung. You can watch the whole video here:
Link to YouTube content
What makes the Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce so special?
The most obvious feature for the high price is the massive all-in-one monoblock, which uses water to cool the main components of the board. The block includes the CPU, voltage converter, M.2 NVMe slots, chipset and even the 10 Gbit network chip.
Additional reasons for the high price of the Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce are the generous features and the 20 high-quality voltage converters. This also makes it clear who the mainboard is aimed at: absolute enthusiasts who want to tease the last bit of performance out of their CPU via overclocking.
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Die Specs des Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce im Detail:
- Support for Intel Core i 10000 and Core i 11000
- Support for a maximum of 128.0 GByte DDR4 up to 5,400 MHz (Core i 11000)
- 20 + 1 voltage converter
- NanoCarbon Baseplate
- AiO-Monoblock mit Display
- Intel WiFi 6E AX210
- 2.5 Gbit / s LAN from Intel, 10.0 Gbit / s LAN from Aquantia
- 3x M.2-NVMe-SSD (PCIe 4.0)
- high quality onboard sound chip (ESS Saber) with USB DAC
In the water cooling block there is also a display for the temperature of the water, the voltage converter and the CPU.
The price is “extreme”
As der8auer admits, the Aorus Xtreme Waterforce is an extraordinarily beautiful board that leaves nothing to be desired in terms of technology. The price that Gigabyte is said to have stated on request at over 2,000 dollars is much too high, however. In his opinion, 800 to 900 dollars are the pain threshold for a Z590 motherboard including a monoblock.
The normal player is also not the target group: The Z590 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce is aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers. For everyone else, it is of no interest anyway, as the performance advantages result solely from the overclocking options and the better power supply.
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