having trouble finding the right mobo

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P1_production

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I know i want at least 16gb of RAM, 6600 or 6700k processor, gtx 970, raid capability, and the fastest machine possible when it comes to productivity and non gaming processes. a little confused on the m.2 stuff and RAID. Havent had a new desktop since I built mine in 2010/11 with a 60gb ssd and 1tb wd black. So im not new to computers however i am not current on new tech. Therefore any help or advice I can get from you guys would be awesome. thanks

other details that may be helpful (wishlist):
trying to make it quiet with liquid cooling (maybe not with NAS)
corsair 600 inverted case
NAS capability
would like BT 4.0+wifi AC capability
 
What kind of RAID setup are you looking to do? What hard drives/SSDs do you plan to use?
 
Any Z170 boards would be good for 6600K for 6700K. Z170 board has build-in raid controller. You could set it both raid0 for ssd and raid1 for two regular hard drives.
Any brand of board you would prefer? I like Gigabyte boards. Asus is good too but I would not buy any more Asus after my past experience with Asus RMA.

What are you using this system for? Z170 only has 6 SATA ports. If you do video editing or things like that, you may consider X99 board and 5820K or 5930K CPU. X99 chipset has 10 SATA ports supporting Raid 0/1/5/10.
 
I'm trying to keep costs down so z170 has enough Sata ports. It will be my all in 1 desktop from photoshop to entertainment center, to light gaming. I want it to be fast and last awhile since my current 1155 build has lasted me 5-6 years
 
P1_production said:
I'm trying to keep costs down so z170 has enough Sata ports. It will be my all in 1 desktop from photoshop to entertainment center, to light gaming. I want it to be fast and last awhile since my current 1155 build has lasted me 5-6 years
Click to expand...

If you're trying to keep costs down, and "light gaming" is your desire, the GTX 970 is a waste of money.

The GTX 970 CURRENTLY can max-out 1080p cutting-edge games, and play these cutting-edge games competently at 1440p high or medium. It's way overkill for more casual gamers, even for the next several years.

Get this card if you feel you might need 4GB VRAM for some crazy reason:

EVGA GeForce GTX 960 DirectX 12 04G-P4-3965-KR 4GB 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 SLI Support ACX 2.0+ Video Card - Newegg.com

That' $200 out-the door, $180 after rebate. Can play most new cutting-edge games at 1080p at high/medium. That will save you $100 over the GTX 970!

But otherwise get this one: it's nearly as fast, and will still play "insert casual online game" comfortably for many years.

ASUS GeForce GTX 950 GTX950-M-2GD5 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready Video Card - Newegg.com

$150 out-the door, $120 after rebate! That will save you $150 over the GTX 970!

Unless you have a 1440p or 4k monitor?
 
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I would not recommend doing RAID 0 SSDs unless you have some sort of backup system. Even then, RAID 0 SSDs won't net you performance gains unless you're doing constant large file transfers to something else that is just as fast, and can actually be detrimental to random access read/write speeds (random access is OS responsiveness, quickness in launching programs, etc).

As said, Z170 can do RAID 0 and RAID 1. Z170 allows for up to 6 hard drives to be connected at a time. I would pick a Gigabyte or MSI board, both have been good to me. ASRock makes intriguing boards, but their warranty page scares me. It's difficult to understand what they mean, and what the actual warranty length is on any of their boards. Asus... forget about any warranty support.
 
Tsumi said:
I would not recommend doing RAID 0 SSDs unless you have some sort of backup system. Even then, RAID 0 SSDs won't net you performance gains unless you're doing constant large file transfers to something else that is just as fast, and can actually be detrimental to random access read/write speeds (random access is OS responsiveness, quickness in launching programs, etc).
Click to expand...

Total rubbish. My FO4 load times, BF4 load times, D3 load times, Windows 10 boot times, Anno asset load times, etc.... are all FAR better with n-RAID-0 compared to single disk.

On a separate note, they really need to find a better name for RAID-0. Striping is not redundant, and now-a-days, inexpensive is very relative.
 
alxlwson said:
Total rubbish. My FO4 load times, BF4 load times, D3 load times, Windows 10 boot times, Anno asset load times, etc.... are all FAR better with n-RAID-0 compared to single disk.

On a separate note, they really need to find a better name for RAID-0. Striping is not redundant, and now-a-days, inexpensive is very relative.
Click to expand...

Proof?

RAID-0 HDDs and RAID-0 SSDs behave very differently. Unless the queue depth is deep (>16, which may happen with a limited number of games that load a lot of data into the RAM), random performance isn't improved with RAID-0 SSDs. In fact, depending on the controller and SSD, it has been demonstrated that random performance can actually decrease.

The best way to get better random performance (OS responsiveness, program loading, etc) is to get an SSD that has higher performance from the beginning, like NVMe drives.
 
BF4 and FO4 both load lots to RAM. They aren't random reads for map/dungeon loads.
Booting is random.

As for proof, well I already did it for myself when I created the raid array. Fresh installed on single drive, took some numbers on clean boot, then did the same with the array. Now, this was done back on Windows 7. I haven't taken times on Windows 10 boot. It boots basically instantly.
There has been dramatic differences in game level load times.
 
Tsumi said:
Proof?

RAID-0 HDDs and RAID-0 SSDs behave very differently. Unless the queue depth is deep (>16, which may happen with a limited number of games that load a lot of data into the RAM), random performance isn't improved with RAID-0 SSDs. In fact, depending on the controller and SSD, it has been demonstrated that random performance can actually decrease.

The best way to get better random performance (OS responsiveness, program loading, etc) is to get an SSD that has higher performance from the beginning, like NVMe drives.
Click to expand...

I did look into this after you posted the little benefit of raid 0 SSD's and ive gathered pretty much the same information to solidify this statement. therefore ive been looking at the PCI slot SSD's which are hands down fastest you can buy at a consumer level thats feasible given normal circumstances. This looks like something i will do. Ram does have alot weight on performance and agility as well from what i have read so im leaning more towards p99 boards additional memory slots in the 32-64gb range or faster speed ram in the x170 board in the 16-32gb range. what do you guys think?
 
P1_production said:
I did look into this after you posted the little benefit of raid 0 SSD's and ive gathered pretty much the same information to solidify this statement. therefore ive been looking at the PCI slot SSD's which are hands down fastest you can buy at a consumer level thats feasible given normal circumstances. This looks like something i will do. Ram does have alot weight on performance and agility as well from what i have read so im leaning more towards p99 boards additional memory slots in the 32-64gb range or faster speed ram in the x170 board in the 16-32gb range. what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

There is no P99. There is only X99, which uses Haswell-E and will use Broadwell-E. As far as RAM speed goes, Skylake (Z107) has higher RAM performance unless the program can take advantage of multiple channels (very few consumer programs do).

Also, what you want are NVMe drives in a motherboard designed for NVMe. Most of the PCI-E SSDs are SATA SSDs in RAID-0 with a SATA-PCI-E interface.
 
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