MSI's $2,099 motherboard is out now, but it's as exclusive as it is absurd

pcgamer.com:

MSI's Godlike motherboards are always extreme. Some might even say they're bereft of value (I would say that, in fact). Though if that is true of previous Godlike motherboards, where does that leave the MSI Godlike Z690—the extreme, premium, top-tier mobo from MSI that's launching today, in a sense, for $2,099.

This gaming motherboard costs as much as a gaming PC. A good one, too. Though there are some willing to spend so much cash on the best. I'm definitely not one of them, however. I baulked at the MSI MEG X570 Godlike once, and that was just $700—down from the original $777 to celebrate AMD's 7nm achievements, which also served as frightful reminder that companies can, and do, just make prices up sometimes.

At least with the MSI MEG Godlike Z690 you're getting a little more in the box than just a motherboard and some accessories. The whole package, which was confirmed with a price tag of $2,099 last year, includes motherboard, MSI's MEG CoreLiquid S360 chip chiller, and a double pack of Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 16GB (32GB in total). That's around $630 in those accessories alone, so the actual motherboard is a fair bit cheaper than it sounds.

It's still ludicrously expensive, of course, at around $1,469 for the motherboard alone. That also means, with the Godlike, your motherboard will actually cost more than double what you'll spend on the best processor Intel makes that it fits: the Core i9 12900K.

So what makes a motherboard worth more than a processor? Perhaps it's the cleaning brush included with the Godlike? Maybe not. Fundamentally, a motherboard's best ability will be to extract the best performance out of that processor and the processor's platform, but when you're talking this much cash you're talking some