Normally it would be a very bad idea to submerge your motherboard in water while it's powered on. That's also true of ASRock's new X570 Aqua, but unlike most motherboards, it's a "completely water cooled" slab for your Ryzen build, with a very large water block covering the important bits.
Technically, the coverage is not complete—the DIMM slots and various components and other bits along the edges are exposed. The rest, however, sits underneath a shiny a custom block that's been "skillfully designed to ensure the heat of the CPU, VRM, and chipset can be dissipated efficiently," ASRock says.
"Coolant is split into three passages so that each area can be cooled separately without interfering with each other. This design also lowers the water resistancy inside the cooling block, giving faster water flow to maintain the best cooling efficiency," ASRock explains.
As the name implies, the X570 Aqua is based on AMD's X570 chipset. That means it supports the latest features, namely PCI Express 4.0. It's the only consumer chipset with PCIe 4.0 support, which primarily comes into play when using a PCIe 4.0 SSD capable of hitting read speeds in the neighborhood of 5,000MB/s.
High end features abound, such as a 14-phase power design for smooth delivery of power to the CPU (in theory this should help with overclocking), built-in Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) support, Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, and an Aquantia 10Gb/s Ethernet port.
ASRock is only making 999 of these boards. It's definitely a niche product, and if the price ends up being around $1,000 as our friends at TomsHardware were hearing a few months ago, it's going to be a tough sell.
