GIGABYTE TRX40

Gigabyte's TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is undeniably an insane motherboard that's dripping with features, but at over £800, it's not exactly affordable and even if you're in the market for CPUs costing upwards of £1,200, you might think twice about splashing out when there are alternatives that will save you £300. That's especially true if you only need a home for a couple of PCIe 4.0 SSDs and aren't too fussed about the added extras of more expensive boards because the TRX40 Aorus Master costs less than £500 and still has plenty of bells and whistles to create a monster 3rd Gen Threadripper system.

There will always be super-premium motherboards that cost twice as much as the rest of the field, but while the vast majority of us will never be able to afford one, it's always great to see manufacturers going all-out to create something awesome and slightly ridiculous. The TRX40 Aorus Xtreme is over-engineered in a lot of ways plus it looks fantastic and sports dozens of cutting-edge features such as dual 10-Gigabit LAN, eight M.2 ports, with four of those coming by way of a high-quality expansion card. We have to admit that it maybe doesn't feel like it's worth nearly £150 more than the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme - the latter looks equally good and sports most of the same features, too. However, if you need the best of practically everything, including insane amounts of storage and cutting-edge networking, and have a suitably enormous wallet, then it doesn't get much more extreme than this.