In previous Ryzen generations mainboard manufacturers had no incentive of investing in luxurious boards for AMD which they rather dedicate to Intel. With the current Zen 2 CPU offering things have changed. MSI sells a € 750,00 X570 Godlike, Asus has it’s € 580,00 Crosshair VIII Formula and Gigabyte it’s X570 Aorus Extreme which also costs you a Kidney @ € 780,00. To top that all of, Asrock has now officially launched the Asrock X570 Aqua a limited edition 999 piece production run of a fully watercooled motherboard which costs you a whopping € 1099,00.
What do you get for € 1099,00?
Asrock X570 Aqua specifications
- Supports AMD AM4 Socket Ryzen™ 2000 and 3000 Series processors
- Supports DDR4 5000+ (OC)
- Intel® Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax (2.4Gbps) + BT 5.0
- AQUANTIA® 10G LAN, Intel® Gigabit LAN
- 3 PCIe 4.0 x16, 3 PCIe 2.0 x1
- NVIDIA® NVLink™, Quad SLI™, AMD 3-Way CrossFireX™
- 7.1 CH HD Audio (Realtek ALC1220 Audio Codec)
- Supports Supports DTS Connect
- 8 SATA3, 1 Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4 x4 & SATA3), 1 Hyper M.2 (PCIe Gen4 x4)
- 1 Front USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C, 10 USB 3.2 Gen1 (4 Front, 6 Rear)
- 2 Intel® Thunderbolt™ 3 Type-C
Well to start of with the VRM, there is a 14 phase VRM that has no trouble feeding your Ryzen 3xxx cpu a stable ammount of current without breaking a sweat. According to Asrock the motherboard layers itself are build on a server quality PCB. Memory wise Asrock claims DDR4 memory speeds of 5000 MHZ. Not that going over 3800 mhz DDR4 gives you any significant gains on Zen2, but that’s besides the point.
I think you agree with me that the most striking thing of the X570 Aqua is the prominent physical covering of the PCB. Almost every part with the exception of the memory slots and lowest part of the board is covered by a silver/white shroud covering an integrated waterblock. This waterblock cools the cpu, vrm’s and the X570 chipset as you can see in the illustration below.
Asrock calls this full cover shroud their ‘Cooling Armor’. And yes, there is even RGB lighting behind the chipset window and in the bottom right corner a unique motherboard number. Who else can brag about that? Maybe 998 others worldwide…
And to finalize this blog we included a picture of the Asrock X570 Aqua I/O. No shortcomings here. Bios Flashback, Thunderbolt 3 Type-C, 10GB Aquantia Lan and even a PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector and plenty of USB 3.x connections.
