Tell me about Z710 motherboards

[photon]

Thinking of upgrading my CPU/Motherboard/Memory, I have a i7-2600k so it's probably time.

i7-6700k looks like a no brainer.

32GB DDR4 looks pretty reasonable

But I haven't been following motherboard reviews for quite a while and am completely behind the times.

Have a 980 GTX so might do SLI in the future. Is m.2 the right thing for SSDs now? Don't need wifi, never been a fan of on-board audio and I have a creative labs one anyway so don't need to spend extra $$ on pumped up onboard audio.

Always like ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards. Any suggestions? Anything I should definitely get or should avoid?

[chemgear]

I went with the Maximus VIII Extreme myself recently. Almost surely overkill by most measures but I've really appreciated the extra USB ports for multiple VR headsets, flightsticks, wheels, etc. Never have to swap them at all.

[PsYcNeT]

I have an Asus Z170-A (mid level basic, ~$250). Stable overclocker, m.2 slot separated from the the other SATA channels, good construction/placement, 3x SLI ready, 1 (unused) USB 3.1 slot.

My only complaint is the wafer is a bit thinner than the Asus P8Z68V-PRO I upgraded from.

[PsYcNeT]

Also, if you're interested in SLI'ing in a few months, I will have one of two GTX 980s for sale whenever the 1080Ti ends up dropping.....

[Hack&Lube]

Have you tried overclocking the 2600K? I'm still running my 2500K @ 5GHz and it's probably> 5 years ago. It's still capable of everything I throw at it. CPUs seemed to have plateaued quite awhile ago with nothing to really strain them.

[PsYcNeT]

I wouldn't say plateaued, however they have certainly stagnated. Generally you see about a 7% performance increase in gaming and a 10% performance increase in applications with each CPU generation (from Intel). AMD crapping the bed for nearly 10 years hasn't helped.

A 6700k should in theory perform about 21%-25% faster than a 2600k when both are overclocked in a gaming environment. This is also factoring in the faster RAM speeds. They also use notably less power and run less hot.

That said, there has been no "killer" upgrade in CPUs for a looooong time. Focus on die shrinkage, power consumption and mobility have been the major factors in that.

[photon]

I've mildly overclocked my 2600k, but between wanting to go to 32GB of RAM and a motherboard hardware problem that doesn't stop me from running my computer but does stop me from monitoring it (cpu speed, temps, etc) and wanting to rebuild from scratch on Windows 10, it just feels like it is time.

[photon]

Woo just finished building the new PC based off the Z170-A, feels pretty fast!!

Gonna take forever to get everything set back up though

[TorqueDog]

32 GB of RAM, so clearly more than just a gaming machine. Are you running VMs on it?

[photon]

Yeah development box as well, and running VMs.. well currently only one VM but now am able to run more.

And I have a tabs problem and I use Chrome, so that eats tons of RAM too. For the minor extra cost it's nice not to have to worry about RAM.

[I_H8_Crawford]

Originally Posted by photon

Woo just finished building the new PC based off the Z170-A, feels pretty fast!!

Gonna take forever to get everything set back up though

I just built mine a couple weeks ago too, lol.

Did you go with the m.2? I went with the Samsung Pro m.2 - this thing boots up in a couple seconds!!

[photon]

Yeah that was the hardest decision, to spend the extra on the m.2 Samsung 850 Pro. In the end I figured the extra $ was worth spent since I can leave my existing drive and boot into my old machine if I have to, all it would take is one thing in my various development environments and it would probably cost me many times the cost of the new drive in lost hours fixing the environment.

EDIT: Though it's been nice it's like cleansing, getting rid of DVD drives, hot swap trays, bunch of extra stuff that I don't use anymore, my computer is so clean now.