A Closer Look
As you can see, this motherboard really is a bit of a beast. It’s extremely heavy and feels like it’s plated in depleted uranium, but I guess, that wouldn’t be all that surprising given the retail price. It’s expensive, yes, but the sheer amount of copper and aluminium used in its construction is significant, and material prices are not our friends in 2023. The VRMs have the Fins-Array III with NanoCarbon Coating heatsinks, which feature an 8mm “Mega-Heatpipe” bridging them, and 12 W/mk thermal pads, as well as an Aluminium I/O cover and even a NanoCarbon Aluminium backplate… crikey.
The backplate is adding a lot of weight, but ironically, it’s needed, to support all the added weight on the other side. Basically, the heatsinks are bolted through the motherboard into the backplate, sandwiching the board, and preventing strain on the PCB, while also adding further material to the board to dissipate heat, so it’s a win-win really.
There are 4 x PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2 slots with M.2 Thermal Guard III & II heatsinks, albeit, you can barely tell what’s what here as it’s all just fancy armour… not that I’m complaining about that, as it looks like a building out of Cyberpunk with all the graphics settings turned to max. The top PCIe slot is their SMD design, PCIe 5.0 x16 with Ultra Durable Armor, so those chunky RTX 4090s shouldn’t prove much trouble for it. There’s a further 1x PCIe 4.0 x4 & 1 x PCIe 3.0 x2 below that too, well clear of the top slot, so it can accommodate a 5-slot graphics card without causing a hardware conflict.
Taking off the rather significant amount of armour, there is actually a motherboard in here somewhere. There’s a Direct 18+2+2 Digital VRM design, which features 105A Smart Power Stages over an 8-layer 2x copper PCB. This combined with two Solid-Pin 8+8 pin CPU power connectors, and you shouldn’t have any trouble running flagship CPUs at their maximum 24/7.
Connectivity is as robust as everything else too, with the latest 10GbE LAN and WiFi 6E, as well as a plethora of USB ports. There are also dual USB-C ports, with a 10G and 20G port for extremely fast external storage, displays and a whole lot more.
There’s also an abundance of RGB effects too, but that’s pretty much expected these days.
