Upgrade time, critiques on my choices sought

Obligatory sticky answers:

1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Games
2) What's your budget? Are tax and shipping included?
$650-700 or so
3) Which country do you live in? If the U.S, please tell us the state and city if possible. US
4) What exact parts do you need for that budget? CPU, RAM, case, etc.
Motherboard/Processor/Memory/CPU Cooler.
5) If reusing any parts, what parts will you be reusing? Please be especially specific about the power supply. List make and model.
Case: Ncase M1
PSU: Silverstone 450W SFX PSU.
Storage: 1TB BX100, 750GB 840 EVO
Video: GTX 970, forget the particular type.
6) Will you be overclocking? Yes, some.
7) What is the max resolution of your monitor? What size is it? 23" 1080p
8) When do you plan on building/buying the PC? Next few days
9) What features do you need in a motherboard? RAID? Firewire? Crossfire or SLI support? USB 3.0? SATA 6Gb/s? eSATA? Onboard video (as a backup or main GPU)? UEFI? etc.
USB 3.1 Gen 2 would be nice but not strictly required.
10) Do you already have a legit and reusable/transferable OS key/license? If yes, what OS? Is it 32bit or 64bit?
Yes, have a Win 10 64-bit license I can use. (free upgrade's very likely going to go bye-bye)

Only other comment is that anything Asus is not going to happen, not going to buy anything from them again if I can help it, their support department SUCKS.

Here's what i'm looking at so far:
Motherboard: MSI Mini ITX Z170I GAMING PRO AC (really don't need the wireless though, may yank the card out for use elsewhere)
Processor: i5-6600K
Memory: 2x8Gig DDR4 2400
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D9L (space limitations, reviews look decent and should fit in the case / not block memory)

Looks pretty good, I do have some suggestions

on the ram you have ddr4 2400, I think the sweet spot for Skylake is around 2800 mhz, but you might be able to overclock to get there. As for a cooler, if you want to save a couple of bucks you might look up the Cryorig M9i, I just picked one up for $25 and not a bad little guys at all.

rhansen5_99 said:

Looks pretty good, I do have some suggestions

on the ram you have ddr4 2400, I think the sweet spot for Skylake is around 2800 mhz, but you might be able to overclock to get there. As for a cooler, if you want to save a couple of bucks you might look up the Cryorig M9i, I just picked one up for $25 and not a bad little guys at all.

Click to expand...

Hmm, well i'll keep that one in mind as a backup choice if the Noctua doesn't work. Definately a backup choice as it's not eligible for prime shipping. (someone's spoiled by prime...)

Not too concerned about memory speeds overall what with the recent benchmarks i've seen saying speeds don't matter in games. Was more looking at brand name and form factor. (something from a good brand without a huge head spreader)

Yeah Cryorig even through Amazon still ships through newegg so it is slow
For the ram speed in games, you are right except for Fallout 4 which does some weird texture swapping with ram (maybe patched at this point).

Whelp, bits ordered, likely not going to get the processor until next Tuesday though. Booo

Newegg is so slow, Amazon prime all the way

ledcriss said:

Newegg is so slow, Amazon prime all the way

Click to expand...

Nice assumption... note how ALL of my links were Amazon. Aka: That was ordering from Amazon.

edit: nevermind you already ordered, oops!

RAM can make a difference, it just depends on factors. Spend the extra $5-$20 bucks and get some 3000.

Ryan7968 said:

edit: nevermind you already ordered, oops!

RAM can make a difference, it just depends on factors. Spend the extra $5-$20 bucks and get some 3000.

Click to expand...

Yeah, the system's been running since Tuesday. Did the final changeover (GPU, SSDs) yesterday. So far everything's working fine, the hardest part was getting the optical drive to burn. "Only" pushed the CPU up to 4Ghz so far, may push it higher later.
Cabling is kind of a small mess, something i'm not exactly proud of but there wasn't a lot of space to shove things out of the way.

Do you fold on that 970?

Skillz said:

Do you fold on that 970?

Click to expand...

The 970 does nothing but play games. Don't want any other noise running given the PSU spools up at a moment's notice. (I want it whisper quiet at idle and it currently is)