Skylake mobo ---- which ?

Abarbarian

Abarbarian

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I am looking to build a Skylake rig and am looking at these three mobos.

Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7

Asus Maximus VIII HERO LGA1151

MSI Z170A GAMING M7

I have chosen them as they all have really decent components which should give the rig a long and trouble free life. They all have some features that I like shame I could not find a board with all the features included.
If anyone has any suggestions for cheaper mobos I would be interested to hear about them.

:cool:
 
They're all good tbh Barb, if it were me I'd probably lean towards the Gigabyte more for brad loyalty if nothing else.

The Asus only had 2 PCI 3.0 slots if it makes a difference!
GB has more USB 3.0 too.
 
Just wondering what your total requirements are there Mr Barb.

When I finally upgrade must admit I'm tempted to try an MSI board.

I used to favour Asus boards but the last (AMD) offering I bought from them has been not very good at all. The Ethernet chip failing within 5 weeks of purchase was not a good start and did tend to put me off them.
 
In answer to all.

I have some spare loot at the moment and probably will never have enough loot in the future to build a decent rig again.
My Asus M2N32/Athlon 5600 and Phenom 965BE are pretty old and will not let me play Skyrim,Metro in full graphical splendour let alone more modern games.
I am a sucker for new shiny stuff.

All I need is a pc to play games in Windows fully maxed out graphically.Like Skyrim with all the best mods that loads fast and plays really smoothly.

For the Linux side I need a pc that will ramp the cpu up and down as I surf or do demanding stuff. I am going to be playing with RAW photos and making some slideshows with fancy effects from large folders of jpgs.
I also want to play around with video stuff and try my hand with Blender and Shotwell type of software.
An I would like to fiddle with Docker and all that sort of stuff.

They all have m.2 ports an I am not bothered about using then in raid. I do fancy one of them PCIE superfast drives at some time, probably beyond reach at the moment.
They all have all the new connectors MSI and Gigabyte in the lead there, not so important for now but in a few years lack of fast ports may be a hindrance.That is a big maybe as I do not have a lot of peripherals.
Audio is good on all with Gigabyte having swap out amps and apparently the best audio offering. Any of then would do me as my hearing is a tad damaged.
They all seem to have pots of four pin fan headers.

I like the sound of the audio bits on the Gigabyte and their connectivity ports are neat.

MSI has great connectivity and some funky oc stuff, an it has dragons.

I have had good reliability from ASUS stuff and it is a good solid all rounder and their software is not bad either in the main. Has a dedicated water pump header.

All in all I am a bit stumped though like Flops am trending towards the MSI. Guess I will have to read up a bit more before making up my mind.

Thoughts and observations welcomed.

:cool:
 
The Asrock looks good to me, about as future proof as you're likely to get at the moment, far as I can tell.

Cosmetics and price are both good as well.

I've had some good Asrock boards in the past. Asrock started life as the budget branch of Asus but it looks as though they've now come into their own.
 
Ta Flop's.
So we have one vote for a possible Asrock, one vote for a possible Gigabyte. An I like Asus but fancy the MSI with the fancy dragons and case badge. So I am back at the beginning again. Mind you Flop's was half fancying a MSI so I guess that is just shading the pack at the moment. :lol:
 
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