Despite the glut of RGB lighting that has infiltrated just about every PC peripheral and component in recent years, motherboards were one of the last to be given that touch. They're hardly the most exciting of components, not exactly delivering much in the way of performance themselves, even if they are deathly important for stability, features, and overclocking.
For some manufacturers, though, like Gigabyte's Aorus division, they can be a work of art and the new Z390 Xtreme from that company could be the best looking -- and one of the most fully featured -- motherboards ever made.
Designed to support Intel's eighth and ninth-generation Coffee Lake CPUs, like the insanely powerful i9-9900K, the motherboard supports dual channel memory in its four slots at up to 4,266MHz and XMP profiles. It has a 16-phase VRM solution for stable and high-end overclocking, support for Thunderbolt 3, armor on each of the three x16 PCIexpress slots for heavy graphics cards, additional styling and cooling across the board in the form of flat heatsinks, and RGB lighting just about everywhere Gigabyte could fit it.
There's space for up to three M.2 NVMe drives under the on board armor, a USB Turbocharger for smartphone and tablet charging on front ports, dual bios for worry-free overclocking, a 10Gb Ethernet port on the rear, along with Thunderbolt 3 ports, and built in Wi-Fi with support for external aerials at the rear.
All of this can be yours for $290 on November 2.
Personally, I still have a soft spot for my old DFI LANPARTY SLI-DR motherboard. It's not much of a looker by modern standards but mid-00's Jon thought it was fantastic. UV-activated PCI and RAM slots were where it's at.
