With ASUS monetizing its exclusivity as being the sole supplier of a Xeon W-3175X-capable client-segment motherboard by selling the ROG Dominus for1,550€, it was only a matter of time before other motherboard makers came out with halo products of their own. GIGABYTE unveiled the C621 Aorus Xtreme, and it's nothing like the board the company supplied to Intel for its 2018 demo of the W-3175X. This monstrosity pulls power from as combination of two 24-pin ATX and four 8-pin EPS connectors, conditioning power for the CPU with a gargantuan 32-phase VRM that's cooled by a large aluminium heatsink that covers not just much of the upper part of the board, but also the I/O area, and much of the board's tail end. It also takes in two 6-pin PCIe connectors to stabilize power for the PCIe slots. The massive PCH heatsink extends to meet up with the VRM heatsink on the other end.

Connectivity includes everything you'd possibly want, with a riser card providing four M.2-22110 slots with PCIe 3.0 x4 wiring, each; a U.2 port, and eight SATA ports completing the storage options; two 1 GbE interfaces driven by Intel I210AT and I219LM controllers, a high-grade onboard audio solution, and an immeasurable amount of overclocker-friendly features that include diagnostic POST code read-outs, voltage measurement points, voltage stabilizers, and a feature-rich BIOS setup program. GIGABYTE didn't reveal pricing.