MSI’s Flagship Z690 Motherboard Arrives With Godlike $2,100 Price Tag

The last time we heard some rumors about MSI’s incoming Z690 Godlike motherboard, we wrote, “it’s not hard to imagine this board eclipsing the $1,000 mark, or more.” We were so naive way back in /checks notes December 2021.
Now that the board has officially arrived, it’s being offered at an eye-popping MSRP of $2,100. Thjs is easily one of the most expensive motherboards of all time. It even eclipses the previously most-insane Z690 motherboard, the Gigabyte Aorus XTREME Waterforce, which is currently selling for $1,899 on Newegg.
As we wrote previously, the MSI Meg Z690 Godlike is an ostentatious E-ATX motherboard that is literally extreme, despite lacking the ubiquitous word in its product name. It offers never before seen features on a motherboard and has more ports and connections than a Fed Ex hub. The standout feature is a 3.5″ IPS LCD panel with touch control, which can display system temps, let you reboot the system or clear the CMOS with one tap of the finger, and lots more. It can even be removed from the system and run externally, and it includes a speaker if you want to watch movies on it. Yes, it’s a bit over the top.

Speaking of which, the mobo has a ridiculous six M.2 connectors for NVME SSDs, one of which supports PCIe 5.0, which is the next-gen storage interface which is just now starting to roll out. It offers double the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0, cranking things up to a whopping 14GB/s theoretical transfer rate. As expected the M.2 slots have heatsinks on both sides of them to prevent throttling, and have RGB stripes running across them vertically which are all synced wirelessly. MSI says it’s a patent-pending design that has something to do with magnets.

Though we’re burying the lede here, one of the reasons this board is so darn expensive is it’s only being sold as a bundle, which we predicted previously. That bundle includes an MSI Meg Coreliquid S360 triple-fan liquid cooling system, and two sticks (32GB) of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 memory, which operates at 4,800MHz out of the box, but can be overclocked up to 6,000Mhz according to Kingston. Also, in order to get your hands on one of these limited edition boards, you will have to be a registered customer with MSI that has purchased one of its previous Godlike motherboards, or one of its Nvidia RTX 3080 or 3090 graphics cards. If you want to see more of the board in-depth, MSI hosted an almost two hour livestream showing off the board recently.
Continue reading

Protect Your Online Privacy With the 5 Best VPNs
Investing in a VPN is a smart choice right now, but the options are vast. To help narrow things down a bit, we've rounded up five of our very favorite consumer services.

RISC-V Tiptoes Towards Mainstream With SiFive Dev Board, High-Performance CPU
RISC V continues to make inroads across the market, this time with a cheaper and more fully-featured test motherboard.

The PlayStation 5 Will Only Be Available Online for Launch Day
The PlayStation 5 isn't going to be available in stores on launch day, and if you want to pick up an M.2 SSD to expand its storage, you'll have some time to figure out that purchase.

ARMing for War: New Cortex-A78C Will Challenge x86 in the Laptop Market
ARM took another step towards challenging x86 in its own right with the debut of the Cortex-A78C this week. The new chip packs up to eight "big" CPU cores and up to an 8MB L3 cache.