ASRock announced its luxurious Intel Z490 Aqua motherboard on Tuesday. It stands out with built-in water cooling, PCIe 4.0 support, overclocking proficiency and a jaw-dropping design. The catch? Like the AMD-powered X570 Aqua motherboard from last year, the company’s only making 999 units.
Newegg lists the ASRock Z490 Aqua for a hefty $1,099.99 with a May 20 release date. That’s $100 over the AsRock X570 Aqua released for AMD CPUs last year, but such is the life for Intel devotees . ASRock advertises this as its new flagship motherboard, but the limited quantity and high price tag make it clear -- this is a status symbol.
The Z490 Aqua is as much a statement piece as it is high-end equipment. Featuring copper PCBs, PCIe 4.0 and “up to 95% VRM efficiency,” the key feature here is the built-in Aqua Cooling Armor water cooling heatsink .
Encased in a white aluminum shell to evoke glaciers, the Z490 Aqua also has programmable RGB lighting that follows and highlights the water flow.
Tucked alongside the I/O shield’s internals is an OLED display for reading motherboard stats, like fan speed and CPU temperature, which users can configure in the BIOS . There’s also what looks to be an extension of the armor on the bottom right of the motherboard over the Z490 chipset that's fully decked out in RGB.
A metal backplate covers most of the motherboard’s backside, while a similar metal plate surrounds the PCIe slots, three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots that are PCIe 4.0-ready (and, therefore, will be limited to performance of the PCIe 3.0 interface) and two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots.
A PCIe 4.0 external base clock generator also aids in overclocking, while a PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD slot helps boost SSD speeds. Two M.2 SATA slots provide additional storage, and you get four DDR4 RAM slots.
With a board this elite, the connectivity options keep coming. You get a USB 2.0 header (two ports) and two USB 3.2 headers (four ports total), giving the back I/O shield eight USB Type-A connections total. Two Thunderbolt 3 ports bring USB Type-C connectivity. A front USB 3.2 Type-C header provides a data transfer rate of to 10 Gbps.
The Z490 Aqua can also help you bring Wi-Fi to your PC build with Intel 802.11ax WiFi and two Ethernet connectors with varying speeds.
Besides its strong specs, visual appeal is clearly a chief motivating factor here, so we recommend your best PC case with a transparent panel for this motherboard. That is assuming you like the GLaDOS / PS5 controller style here.