Motherboard suggestions for Skylake & GTX 970 System

[Stumpen666]

I'm building a new system with Skylake 6600K, Geforce GTX 970 and 16 GB Ram (DDR4 2666) and wanna get your suggestions for a good but affordable Z170 motherboard at around 150$. There are plenty offerings from different manufacturers. My favourite at the moment is this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157633&cm_re=asrock_extreme_4_z170-_-13-157-633-_-Product

I would like to overclock the CPU when the stock 3,5 Ghz of the 6600K won't be sufficient anymore. SLI is not a must but good onboard sound would be great. But the price is the main argument. The cheaper the better but overclocking should still be easy.

The Asrock should do the job just fine. Somebody got experience with that board or could anyone suggest something better and even cheaper? I'm on a tight budget ;-)

Thanks in advance and a nice Sunday for all users still reading this dying forum...

[Tentacle]

Well, I actually JUST built myself a Skylake computer as well, and I went for the Asus VIII Ranger motherboard. Didn't do too much research on the mobo, but I've heard good things about Asus' Ranger and Hero models. I can say that so far I am really pleased with the one I got. Been using it for less than a week though, but overclocking was a breeze on it. Got my 6700K up to 4,7 GHz (stock 4,0 GHz) without me having to do almost anything. A press of a button and the mobo gradually overclocked and ran some CPU tests to see where it lost stability and used the highest stable setting. The BIOS settings were INCREDIBLY advanced... too many settings for me to even read up on. Definitely allows you to do a lot in there, but thankfully it also had an easy-mode for all that. The onboard sound also got a really good score in the reviews I read, but I'm just using two standard desktop speakers and haven't done any recording or anything so I can't say much else than it definitely plays sounds. Got 16 gigs of 2800 MHz ram and a GTX 970 as well, and everything worked as it should straight out of the box.

But, I paid 209 euro for it, so it's more expensive than your ASRock card though, so maybe all this sharing was for naught. Here's the Newegg link for the card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132586&cm_re=Asus_VIII_Ranger-_-13-132-586-_-Product

[Stumpen666]

Thanks for your input but i just ordered the above mentioned motherboard. Your board seems indeed pretty nice but it is above my budget :-( unfortunately... your onboard sound seems to be indeed pretty good and above the asrocks. Let's see how the sound and the overclocking on the asrock is... i'll give feedback when everything is running :-)

[Fonias]

For a system with one gfx card and an ssd + hdd you are quite safe with most motherboards. You want to check if their oc bios features fit your needs and any reports of coil whine. AsRock have been doing a lot of things right lately. In Sweden the 5 most popular choices are Asus motherboards. I have used Asus before but I kinda dislike their software. Anyway, it looks like a solid choice, I would probably have gone with EVGA,MSI or ASUS in that order but like I said above, the issues arise when you put in a second gfx card and 3 hdds and a PCIe ssd and an m2... then you want to start looking at lane distribution, which sata ports are turned off when using the m2, spacing between PCie slots etc etc...

I find it hard to justify upgrading from a 2700k@4.7 . If I had to go skylake now, I would probably focus on a high quality PSU and EVGA mobo to avoid coil whine. Which 970 are you getting?

[chantman]

I just got the Aus ROG Maximus Hero 8 for my 6700k, 2x970's....  It's working great.

[Tentacle]

I'll just add the 970 that I got in here for the sake of argument. Got the Asus Strix 970 GTX, which is slightly overclocked out of the box and comes with software that allows you to easily overclock it. I haven't bothered overclocking it yet as pretty much everything (except The Witcher 3) seems to be working on ultra settings or close to it at 1440p, which is pretty damn nice. The Strix has a 0 dB feature as well, so as long as the card is below like 60 degrees or something, the fans on it won't even run, making the computer pretty much completely silent for normal desktop work. Didn't bother doing SLI though as it doesn't feel like it's worth it, and instead I'll just update the GFX card after like 2 generations to keep up (if PCI-E still is the standard then).

[Adex]

Asrock and MSI Motherboard are low-end motherboards. MSI andAsrock have shitty support for their products, if something goes wrong.....and expect something to fry on these motherboards if you overclock. The components on these motherboards are cheap shit. If you want quality Motherboards and excellent support go for Gigabyte or Asus. It will cost you more money, but you will get quality and stability instead of shit. You get what you pay for.

[Dr_Grinch]

I gotta say, my recent experience with ASRock was bad. Mini-ITX board shit the bed after about 10 hours of use in a custom build my brother and I did. Really frustrating after just getting it buttoned up and running. Ended up switching to Asus, which we should have done from the outset.

[Fonias]

My previous Asrock and MSI comments were about some top end models. Asrock have done some decent efforts on absolute top end motherboards and MSI have good top end Graphics cards. For mid-range i7 systems and down, it's definitely safer to go with ASUS or Gigabyte. ASUS support I have mixed experience with, I wanted to replace a busted capasitor on a gfx card and even if I was absolutely sure what it was, they would not confirm it (took about 4 days for that answer). MSI and EVGA have different policies on that matter.