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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.
The “wire less” RGB zones run across the board’s M.2 heatsinks. (Image: MSI)
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.
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