Alder Lake motherboard for US$1,399: ASRock launches the water-cooled Z690 Aqua OC with a hefty price tag

Mainboards may be a vital component of every PC, but in today's market which has been ravaged by a continuous semiconductor shortage, the vast majority of gamers is probably more concerned about skyrocketing asking prices for GPUs rather than the prices of Intel motherboards. However, the well-known Taiwanese hardware manufacturer ASRock has now released two Alder Lake mainboards that might financially be out of reach for many gamers.

The US$1,299 ASRock Z690 Aqua and the even more expensive ASRock Z690 Aqua OC are designed to work with Intel's latest and greatest Alder Lake CPUs like the Core i9-12900K. As the name of these motherboards already suggests, they offer a monoblock cooling solution which should effortlessly keep the temperatures of both the processor as well as the mainboard's beefy power delivery system under control. The base ASRock Z690 Aqua further comes with four RAM slots that support DDR5 memory at up to 6400 MHz, and other high-end features like PCIe Gen 5.0, WiFi 6E support as well as two Thunderbolt 4 and a 10 gigabit ethernet port.

The complete technical specifications of these mainboards can be found on the according product page on ASRock's official website. Both of these crazy expensive Alder Lake motherboards will become available in the next few weeks, and the Z690 Aqua OC will supposedly receive a limited edition of just 500 units. Affluent gamers who can't wait to get their hands on these Intel Alder Lake mainboards can already preorder them on Newegg.