A VGA port in 2021 is highly useful when you need to test the CRT projector you inherited from your grandfather.

Seems incredibly reduced for a Z series board. This will have to be VERY cheap (£60-£70 IMO) to make sense, I guess it's aimed at modest home/office PCs that will have an i3/i5 in them, however you would be much better served waiting for the B series or just going 11th gen..

This reminds me of asrock phantom x570 crappy board with missing features and subpar vrms. If you want a z690 get a real thing.

Undying:

This reminds me of asrock phantom x570 crappy board with missing features and subpar vrms. If you want a z690 get a real thing.

Stairmand:

Seems incredibly reduced for a Z series board. This will have to be VERY cheap (£60-£70 IMO) to make sense, I guess it's aimed at modest home/office PCs that will have an i3/i5 in them, however you would be much better served waiting for the B series or just going 11th gen..

Maybe this will find its way to those so called Gaming PCs sold in various marketplaces, mainly by third party sellers. The seller can then rightfully claim the PC has a mighty Z690 motherboard, even if it's lacking the features actually making Z690 interesting.

Kaarme:

Maybe this will find its way to those so called Gaming PCs sold in various marketplaces, mainly by third party sellers. The seller can then rightfully claim the PC has a mighty Z690 motherboard, even if it's lacking the features actually making Z690 interesting.

They need to roll out cheaper b660 boards for non K cpus and resonable price/quality. Well if intel does not lock the memory overclocking again on lower and boards and locked chips 😀

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

Z690 motherboards are quite expensive and often start at 250 USD/EUR. In that mindset, if you strip away some features you could make a cheaper motherboard. Gigabyte did just that. ... Gigabyte to offer price competitive Z690 mobo that lacks PCIe 5.0

The price is 190 Euro excluding tax so it's not that cheap... 🙁 The lack of PCIe 5.0 is already in shop in Asrock flavour (Phantom Z690M gaming 4) , Asus and MSI version will be before xmas. On other hand the PCIe 5.0 GPU will be aviable when Intel 1700 would be EOL lol

Kaarme:

A VGA port in 2021 is highly useful when you need to test the CRT projector you inherited from your grandfather.

RS 232 and analogic VGA are still essential on some pro activity... (exemple in studio or precision industry where RS 232 is less sensible to parasit noise)

Undying:

They need to roll out cheaper b660 boards for non K cpus and resonable price/quality. Well if intel does not lock the memory overclocking again on lower and boards and locked chips 😀

Even for K most of them can reach same result with B chipset...

Kaarme:

Maybe this will find its way to those so called Gaming PCs sold in various marketplaces, mainly by third party sellers. The seller can then rightfully claim the PC has a mighty Z690 motherboard, even if it's lacking the features actually making Z690 interesting.

Sadly, I expect this is bang on.

Kaarme:

A VGA port in 2021 is highly useful when you need to test the CRT projector you inherited from your grandfather.

you's be surprised how many older digital projectors lack any digital inputs, lots of them installed in offices and schools.

It's got a serial header on the board, so you can easily have RS232, which I too still need sometimes for network devices initial setup etc......BUT what got me was, as I looked at the pic first to see if I can find a RS232 header and just post "there is a header guys" I instead saw this long header and tiny letters below "LPT" and thought...no, that can't be, can't see a serial header but got this and then went to the website and did my part of RTFM and yes, it's a Parallel Port and it luckily also got a RS232 Port header. Actually, a nice board. I know companies who need and buy exactly such boards. The multitude of display options is well in that sense, you often come across really old devices, even MS-DOS sometimes tbh and youi better have "options" to get the job done.

what you think is a bargain, is just a lot of parts they don't know what to do with thrown on a recent chipset to get rid of otherwise unsellable hardware as Kaarme said they look like pre-built PCs with throwaway motherboard and psu

Good decision . You don't need PCI 5 for another couple of years. PCIE 4 is plenty enugh.

What...no ISA slot??