Thursday, April 4th 2019
Gigabyte to Bundle Overclocked, Cherry-picked Intel Core i9-9900K With $900 Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce
Gigabyte has been stretching its product portfolio for a while now, and it seems the company really wants to be the one to distribute everything on your PC if it can. Of course, no company does this based on its good heart - Gigabyte is putting up a margin on all products, as the whole spirit of business and capitalism requires. Their latest move is to bundle an overclocked, cherry-picked Intel Core i9 9900K CPU with their most expensive motherboard to date, the Z390 Aorus Extreme Waterforce. This motherboard alone retails for $999, and is built from a "Gigabytestein" of parts such as their Z390 Aorus Extreme motherboard ($550) paired with a custom waterblock.
The good part of having the CPU bundled with the motherboard is that Gigabyte has taken the pains of BIOS tweaking to ensure proper, stable operation - each combo has already been tended to by Gigabyte's engineers - stress testing included - and is guaranteed to work at the cherry-picked 5.1 GHz frequency on all cores. The bundle pricing isn't known as of yet, but pairing the $999 motherboard with a CPU that usually retails for around $525 (due to price fluctuations on account of Intel's CPU shortages) amounts to a cool $1,524 - add in a Gigabyte tax and the price of cherry-picking these CPUs (Silicon Lottery has these i9-9900K going for an out of stock $939), and a bundle price of $1,899 would still be worth it - if you really (really) want that motherboard.
Sources:
Tom's Hardware, Silicon Lottery
The good part of having the CPU bundled with the motherboard is that Gigabyte has taken the pains of BIOS tweaking to ensure proper, stable operation - each combo has already been tended to by Gigabyte's engineers - stress testing included - and is guaranteed to work at the cherry-picked 5.1 GHz frequency on all cores. The bundle pricing isn't known as of yet, but pairing the $999 motherboard with a CPU that usually retails for around $525 (due to price fluctuations on account of Intel's CPU shortages) amounts to a cool $1,524 - add in a Gigabyte tax and the price of cherry-picking these CPUs (Silicon Lottery has these i9-9900K going for an out of stock $939), and a bundle price of $1,899 would still be worth it - if you really (really) want that motherboard.
35 Comments on Gigabyte to Bundle Overclocked, Cherry-picked Intel Core i9-9900K With $900 Z390 Aorus Xtreme Waterforce
Going by a 5 star rating system, I never settle for 5 stars being less than 70% approval. I never buy products that have 1 star being greater than 10%. It is best if 4 and 5 stars equal >90% approval rating to all but guarantee a great product.
This system has served me very well, but it also applies to any brand of course.
Still though, I can clearly see the trends with every brand. Somehow its never just one isolated incident but a whole string of them before a company 'seems to recover'. MSI is a great example of that, they used to be bottom barrel, now they're super consistent with their gaming product portfolio - also in quality.
I think its a policy thing. We also have many reports of horrible Gigabyte RMA experiences lately. That mixes quite well with 'maximize profit' and a price hike without a quality improvement on Aorus.