CES 2019: GIGABYTE Shows Off RTX 2060s, Monitor, and Watercooled Z390 Motherboard

In our first day of travels at CES 2019, we met with our friends at GIGABYTE who had a lot to share. A couple of months back, they showed off the Z390 AORUS Extreme which was an incredibly feature-laden board with a robust VRM. Today they showed the Z390 AORUS Extreme Waterforce which adds a water block and cools the CPU, VRM, and chipset taking an already over the top motherboard and making it even cooler… in this case, literally.

AORUS RGB Series SSD

Additionally, they announced a RGB AIC SSD along with a M.2 variant.  The AIC version comes in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB with speeds rated at 3480 MB/s reads and 3080 MB/s writes making it one of the faster available in the market. Speed isn’t the only change with the new SSD, AORUS has also adorned it with an aluminum heatsink (makes contact with flash memory via thermal pad) and frosted RGB LEDs surrounding it taking the aesthetic to the next level. The RGB LED implementation is controlled via RGB Fusion software.

AORUS Gaming Monitors

The AORUS team has also come out with their first monitor, a 27″ 2560×1440 10-bit IPS 144 Hz panel which they say covers 95% of the DCI-P3 color space. The monitor includes a sturdy metal stand with a handle on top for easy transport. It also has height adjustment and swivel functionality, as well as RGB LED accent lighting on the back. It also supports Freesync frame syncing technology (and who knows, perhaps an NVIDIA G-Sync compatible rating as well).

Other cool features are its ability to support OSD settings for a slew of items such as an aiming reticle, frame rate monitoring, color adjustments, and even a feature called Advanced Noise Cancellation (ANC) which improves audio by minimizing ambient noise. This is accomplished with a microphone integrated into the monitor itself.

There is also an aim assist feature on the monitor which does just as the name implies, assists with aiming. To see this in action was really a sight. For example, in a first-person shooter, typically when firing a weapon there is a ‘kick’ to it which changes the aim point. With aim assist enabled, this reduces the amount of travel away from the initial aim point. The cool thing about this (and the reticle) is that it is baked into the firmware and doesn’t get recognized by anti-cheat software as it isn’t using CPU cycles for its functionality. The monitor will be available January 18th with a $599 price tag.

GIGABYTE RTX 2060 Graphics Cards

We also caught a glimpse of their RTX 2060 lineup consisting of (for the US) a mini-ITX size version, a Windforce cooling adorned card with three fans and a larger heatsink, as well as the extreme version which will use the heatsink aesthetic from the 10 series GPUs.

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– Joe Shields (Earthdog)