This Motherboard Costs HOW MUCH??????

This is ASROCK’s Z690 AQUA motherboard, And I’ve been informed that if you fancy picking one of these up, you’ll have to part ways with… $1,300! Quite probably the same in British Pounds too, or more money that most people’s first car costs… For that absolute insanity of a price tag, I’ve heard they give you a rather special experience, so first I want to take a look at what you get for your money, then since it’s a custom watercooled board I thought it would make sense to build a nice little system with the help of this video’s sponsor, Phanteks and OverclockersUK, complete with custom watercooling of course, then test it along with some high speed DDR5-5600 RAM to see if all this fanciness makes literally any difference!

So, first things first, this ridiculous board. Immediately just looking at the box you can tell this is meant to be a premium experience. It folds open, with a cutout for the AQUA logo, and folds out again, and.. Oh there’s a little envelope with TechteamGB written on it… What’s in here? Oh it’s a note from ASRock’s President, and a little credit card with TechteamGB embossed on it. Damn, that’s fancy. And no, sadly this isn’t a credit card with some kind of refund on it. Ok, let’s lift this piece up and.. There she is! What a monster! The full cover waterblock is the clear standout, although the sheer amount of plastic peel is almost concerning. Let’s get the board out of here… Wow, it’s heavy! Like, really heavy.. That’s crazy! Ok and under the motherboard plate you find the accessories – you’ve got some extra thermal pads which is nice, and oh the tiniest unbranded tube of thermal paste ever! Haha! I expect this is here not because they expect you to actually use it, but because if they didn’t include at least some you know someone would complain. Anyway, you of course get a manual, WiFi antennas, and this one is the coolest bit – this is a watercooling loop pressure tester. You hook it up to your loop before you pour your fluid in, then pump it up and see if there are any air leaks. If there are, the pressure will drop over time and you know you need to fix them before filling your loop. I’ll be using this later!

The board itself is pretty crazy – under this massive waterblock is a 20 phase, 105A “Smart Power Stage”, VRM solution that should be able to (just about) power the nuclear reactor that is the Intel i9-12900K I’ll be using in it. You get an OLED display to show status messages, triple M.2 slots, PCIe Gen 5 to both the top x16 PCIe slot and can be split to the second x16 slot too, you even get both 10G and 2.5G LAN on the back on top of WiFi 6E – that’s a AQUANTIA AQC113CS 10G LAN chip too, not the now ageing AQC107. There are also dual Thunderbolt 4 ports with TWO DisplayPort in ports to feed display signals through BOTH Thunderbolt ports. That’s crazy! It’s even got TechteamGB on the chipset heatsink too! As I understand it this will normally be 1 of 500 rather than your name, and the credit card type thing is more like the certificate of authenticity. Anyway, enough fawning over this, let’s build this into a system so we can test it out.

The main attraction for this build – beyond the insane motherboard anyway – is this, the Phanteks Enthoo Evolv X, now in a rather stunning white. While they are literally paying me to say this, I genuinely love Phanteks’ cases, and the Evolv X is still hands down my favourite PC case on the market. Everything about it has been actually thought out and tailored to both look great – I mean just look at it – and to make it functional and easy to build in. All the screws come in a hard case nicely divided so you can easily find what you are looking for and store it easily. The side panels swing out on a hinge rather than screw on so you can just pop them open to tweak something or lift them off to work on your system. Hell, with an extra bracket you can run a second ITX system up at the top – which if you use their Revolt X PSU you can run from a single PSU as well!

For this build though, I’m using their Revolt Pro which lets you daisy-chain multiple power supplies to increase their power output. While we can’t use it in the Evolv X, it’s a pretty cool feature to have built in for larger systems that are going crazy with their power hungry components. Of course, all of the parts I’ll be using here will be linked below to OverclockersUK, at least the ones that you can actually buy right now as the motherboard doesn’t seem to be available yet. Right, I think it’s time to get a timelapse going and get building!

Ok, let me walk you through the full setup. Of course we have our beautiful Evolv X case which is housing our insane grand-and-a-half motherboard, which itself is housing an Intel i9-12900K, 32GB of DDR5-5600 CL40 Kingston RAM, a 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus SSD, an Asus STRIX OC RTX 3070Ti, an 850W Revolt Pro PSU, and naturally a completely overkill watercooling setup with a D5 pump, res, 240mm and 360mm radiators, and hardline tubing because why not. Not bad, eh?

Before I filled the loop, I attached the little leak detector pump and pressurised the whole system to around 7 PSI. I shut off my drain valve and left the system pressurised for around half an hour, and when I came back it was still at the same pressure, meaning I should have no leaks! Filling the loop was a big of a pain thanks to a bit of poor planning on my part, but this EK filler bottle came in very handy, along with lots of shaking the system to remove the air bubbles.

I’ve also overclocked this bad boy to 5.2GHz all core on the P cores and 3.8GHz all core on the E cores – of course our RAM is running at it’s full 5600MT/s – and all in this chip chokes back an absolutely astonishing 310W here, and smashes it’s way up to 101°c nearly instantly. Even with this full cover block, the central P cores hit 102°c real fast, like, almost instantly, then stays there the whole time it’s rendering. The fans ramp up hard too, that’s something I could tweak in the BIOS but it also feels somewhat needed with this insane thing so I’m going to leave it as-is.

But, does all this fancy stuff – the watercooling, the first-year-of-car-insurance priced motherboard and the high speed RAM actually make any difference? Well, yes, but also no. Cinebench sees a decent 5% rise compared to both running at Intel’s spec of 4800MT/s and this kit at it’s rated 5600MT/s but without a CPU overclock, and more like a 6 or 7% lead in the two Blender render tests. Hell, it can even offer between 3 and 8% more performance in the Adobe CC suite as shown by the Puget Bench suite, but like I said your power bill will suffer the consequences. But, let’s face it, if you drop a grand and a half on a motherboard, and what probably adds to closing on 4 grand for the whole system, you don’t care about your power bill.

What you care about is gaming, and especially compared to the base spec 4800 RAM, in a CPU heavy gaming like CSGO, even at 1440p on low settings, you can expect almost 10% more performance which is pretty sweet! Nevermind it’s the difference between 550 and 600FPS, that’s not important (/s). Microsoft Flight at 1440p medium can give almost 10 FPS more on average, and over 20% better 1% low performance, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s CPU render results are insane! Almost 15% more CPU render performance compared to the stock RAM setting, and 13% better 95% times too. The in-game average FPS is pretty much within margin for error though.

Annndddd that’s the case with both Cyberpunk 2077, where our mad OC build is within 1 FPS average of the other runs, and in Fortnite where it’s an almost exact tie with the higher frequency memory run, albeit with slightly improved 1% low figures.

So, does all this madness really improve your performance – gaming or not? In short… No.

If you are planning a new build, especially in white, I can’t recommend the new white Evolv X enough. It’s a genuinely well thought out case, stylish as hell especially in this stunning white, and feels likely it was designed by people who have actually built a PC before. They know the pains and they’ve solved them so building in this is simple. Check it out at the OverclockersUK link in the description – along with some of the other parts here like their Revolt Pro PSU – and thank you again to both Phanteks and OverclockersUK for sponsoring this video, and to you for watching!