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I am going with ASUS Maximus VII Hero
I really like the look of the board and the fan controls, seems to be built with very solid components and supports up to 3600mhz DIMMs
A close second is the MSI Z170A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM EDITION
Is that the one that has all the SATA ports pointing up? (yuck) Or is that the Krait? I would've probably gone with the Hero if I was looking to spend more, didn't see any reason to tho.
Hero's probably better built and has better cooling or power delivery, but I've never felt held back OC'ing with more budget boards. Maybe I'm just blissfully...
Edit: That XPower Titanium looks nice, real nice, dunno about $300 nice tho. What makes it worth $60 more than the Hero (which is already pricey IMO)?
3D Mark is never an indication of anything. It's numbers are entirely arbitrary. The factors that improve 3D mark scores don't have the same effect in actual games. That's been the case pretty much since the beginning. Well at least when they stopped using an actual game engine in the benchmark.
Unfortunately at least for the Titan X a third card does very little in most games if anything at all. Scaling past two GPUs blows as usual. If you really want to go the triple SLI route I'd go with X99. The PLX chip still shoehorns data through the CPU's 16x PCIe lanes. The PLX also adds latency so keep that in mind. It isn't huge, but neither is the "gains" from 3x cards in SLI.
Again the M.2 drives will have to connect to the PCH. You will have to contend with DMI 3.0's limited bandwidth which basically tops out at 40Gbps. So you won't get much benefit out of having that second drive. At least not for reads. Write speeds are much slower and as a result still scale normally.
Any M.2 drives connected via adapter cards (or PCIe based drives) that go through the PLX are going directly to the CPU. You can do that but software RAID will be your only option. The onboard RAID OROM will not be able to detect those. So you will not be able to create a bootable array that way. It's simply how Intel's IRST implementation works.
You are correct in that it is overkill, but if that is overkill what do you call that Giabyte G1 for $499? I mean seriously WTF.
I am going with ASUS Maximus VII Hero
I really like the look of the board and the fan controls, seems to be built with very solid components and supports up to 3600mhz DIMMs
A close second is the MSI Z170A XPOWER GAMING TITANIUM EDITION
I was eying the MSI as well, but didn't want to wait till Sept. Ended up going with the MSI Z710A Gaming M7 since it had all the features I really wanted from Titanium for less money. I didn't think the color was worth $70 (now $90) after combo savings from newegg.
Started the install last night, but will have to rip to board out and send it back to newegg since I had to buy it again with the CPU combo.
I'm not horribly worried about temps either, but it's something I intend to test, and I've been thinking about slapping some heatsinks on it too.
You going SLI? (you mention one GPU not yet installed, I think) I'm doing CF and I'm mostly worried about the GPU warming up the SSD
I think I might try to do several smaller heatsinks rather than a long one tho, even if the latter might look better. The NAND doesn't really get hot, just the controller, might be counter productive to spread it's heat around unto the NAND chips.
FrozenCPU and Perf PCs have dozens of low profile heatsink that'll fit, shoot I've probably got some laying around, I need to start looking into it.
The above post is correct. I too am waiting for a 6700K.
I'm teetering between the Asus Z170-A and the ASRock Extreme4. I may do a Z170 Deluxe if I can get a deal on one.
I picked up an MSI Z170A M5 with the i7 6700k.
So far the board is completely solid with zero issues.
I just picked up a M7 and 6700k. Won't have time to put it together for a couple more days though.
There's a new bios for the M7 (dated 9/3 I think). When you built up your M5 did you flash the bios to the latest before loading an OS? No problems with memory off the bat? One of the things that worries me a little is that I've got 32GB of GSkill Ripjaws 4 & am a little concerned that with the as shipped bios it might cause issues if I go right to loading a full OS. I'm guessing the newer bios might provide better memory compatibility.
Yes, I did load the new 1.3 BIOS before installing Win 7 or Win 10. No issues with the BIOS and memory or XMP.
I can't decide between the EVGA classified or the MSI M9... what does everyone think?