Thursday, April 4th 2019
Gigabyte to Bundle Overclocked, Cherry-picked Intel Core i9-9900K With $900 Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce
Gigabyte has been stretching its product portfolio for a while now, and it seems the company really wants to be the one to distribute everything on your PC if it can. Of course, no company does this based on its good heart - Gigabyte is putting up a margin on all products, as the whole spirit of business and capitalism requires. Their latest move is to bundle an overclocked, cherry-picked Intel Core i9 9900K CPU with their most expensive motherboard to date, the Z390 Aorus Extreme Waterforce. This motherboard alone retails for $999, and is built from a "Gigabytestein" of parts such as their Z390 Aorus Extreme motherboard ($550) paired with a custom waterblock.
The good part of having the CPU bundled with the motherboard is that Gigabyte has taken the pains of BIOS tweaking to ensure proper, stable operation - each combo has already been tended to by Gigabyte's engineers - stress testing included - and is guaranteed to work at the cherry-picked 5.1 GHz frequency on all cores. The bundle pricing isn't known as of yet, but pairing the $999 motherboard with a CPU that usually retails for around $525 (due to price fluctuations on account of Intel's CPU shortages) amounts to a cool $1,524 - add in a Gigabyte tax and the price of cherry-picking these CPUs (Silicon Lottery has these i9-9900K going for an out of stock $939), and a bundle price of $1,899 would still be worth it - if you really (really) want that motherboard.
Sources:
Tom's Hardware, Silicon Lottery
The good part of having the CPU bundled with the motherboard is that Gigabyte has taken the pains of BIOS tweaking to ensure proper, stable operation - each combo has already been tended to by Gigabyte's engineers - stress testing included - and is guaranteed to work at the cherry-picked 5.1 GHz frequency on all cores. The bundle pricing isn't known as of yet, but pairing the $999 motherboard with a CPU that usually retails for around $525 (due to price fluctuations on account of Intel's CPU shortages) amounts to a cool $1,524 - add in a Gigabyte tax and the price of cherry-picking these CPUs (Silicon Lottery has these i9-9900K going for an out of stock $939), and a bundle price of $1,899 would still be worth it - if you really (really) want that motherboard.
35 Comments on Gigabyte to Bundle Overclocked, Cherry-picked Intel Core i9-9900K With $900 Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce
-Nick Cage 2019
They seriously need to hire a proven industrial Designer!
For me, 5.1Ghz all core seems impressive (unless it IS running at 1.35V+).
For the same product, without the included liquid-cooled element . No LQ, price is € 534 to € 575, and also here is the price across all limits for some diamond candy ,worth 20€ or less investments
. The difference in price could comprise the entire liquid cooling system, and not parts that cost € 120.
There is no 10 gb / s net !and PLX chip!, just a miserable chipset offer with 30 € AUDIO upgrades, you can get much cheaper board.
Ironically, Gigabyte was usually a good address for bang/buck. With Aorus they destroyed that USP and gave us nothing in return, trying to ride the RGB wave. So you have this odd combination of premium pricing over bottom barrel parts. Fans are a good example, but re-used or badly chosen heatsinks and direct contact heatpipes on GPUs are other such examples. It just screams lazy and cheap.
And I'm not such a fan of all the RGB or the board layout, it's just not nice for me... :(
All brands have some shitty and some good products at the same time. The Z390 extreme form gigabyte does have the best VRM on any Z390/X470 board.
It's not bad just because it's from gigabyte.