Gigabyte's latest Intel motherboard is a little bit sideways, and it's all about reaching 10,400 MT/s with a megabucks DRAM kit

When it comes to motherboards, it's quite rare to see manufacturers try something unusual, and if you browse the market, you'll be swamped by a sea of very familiar layouts and configurations. But for its newest Intel Z890 offering, Gigabyte has chosen to do things rather differently, and you can thank the serious overclocking crowd for that.

At first glance, the Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Tachyon Duo X Ice might just come across as a normal, white-coloured Intel motherboard. But then you'll notice that the DRAM slots are in the 'wrong' position, as are the primary M.2 SSD connectors. The CPU power sockets are in an odd place, too, and the rear IO panel looks incredibly sparse for a modern motherboard.

However, the Aorus Tachyon Duo X Ice (I am not writing all that out again) isn't a 'normal' mobo, and the reason for the funky DIMM position is that it sports Gigabyte's D5 Duo X technology, which "revolutionizes memory performance through four breakthrough technologies, delivering traditional 4-slot maximum capacity using only 2 DIMM slots while unleashing extreme overclocking potential."

Translation? The motherboard supports up to DDR5-10400, or you can install a set of CQDIMMs, rated to DDR5-8000. If you're wondering what they are, CQDIMMs are CUDIMMs with quad-rank memory modules, allowing for a total of 256 GB of memory to be stuffed into your rig, without having to wave goodbye to performance.

If you're wondering just how much money a 256 GB CQDIMM kit will set you back, I'm afraid I can't answer that question, as there doesn't seem to be any on the market right now. However, a 48 GB DDR5-8800 CUDIMM kit will set you back $900 at Newegg, so even if you do stumble across a set, the price tag will be absolutely astronomical.

Gigabyte's new motherboard might be all cleverly laid out to maximise memory performance, but it's sadly lacking in areas that make it ideal as an everyday board for a gaming PC. While you get a reasonable number of M.2 slots for storage (four in total), the rear IO panel is rather bare: just one USB 3.2 Type-C (20 Gbps) and five USB 3.2 Type-A (10 Gbps) ports.

They're speedy enough, of course, but a grand total of six ports wouldn't support half the devices I need to use on my own main PC.

I'm also rather puzzled by the big heatsink covering the IO panel and CPU VRMs, because it seems to clash hard against the primary PCIe slot. It's so close that I can't see how you're meant to fit a beefy graphics card in there, unless it has a very slim backplate.

Perhaps it's just how it all looks in the images, though, as I can't imagine Gigabyte would design a motherboard that it says is great for gaming, but then make it actually awkward to use with a gaming graphics card.

One person's ick is another person's ice cream, so while the Tachyon isn't going to appear anywhere on my wishlist of motherboards, I'm sure that there will be a few hardcore overclockers who are genuinely interested. Alas, there is no indication of its price tag just yet, but coupled with the fact that super-fast and high-capacity DRAM is ridiculously overpriced at the moment, I suspect that Gigabyte will be counting off the number of sales on one hand.

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