I'm building a new Skylake PC that I'll use almost exclusively for gaming (web browsing a bit too). ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and other top manufacturers offer a variety of Z170 boards at varying levels.
I tend to overclock my cpu's in a simple manner--adjusting only the frequency and core voltage (since I care almost exclusively about how I can achieve the highest stable framerate within games, I don't touch many of the other overclocking changes such as xmp profiles, strap whateverthewho etc which tend to yield unnoticeable gaming framerate increases).
I don't like to spend money on features I wont use so ultimately, I have a central question: With all the different motherboards out there for the Skylake processor, will a higher end motherboard make any difference in overclocking and therefore gaming framerate? i.e Will I see any differences in the overclock of a given CPU and therefore higher framerate playing Witcher 3 on the ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Extreme vs the ASUS Z170-A?
Overclocking isn't going to be worth it with the 6700 already turboing to 4ghz. If you want to play with overclocking get a 5820K, granted that's pretty overkill for your needs.
What's your budget anyways?
under $1000 i7 6700+390
what's your display set up as well? if it's only 1080p 60hz you should upgrade that before buying a high end GPU
Hmm, I believe overclocking will be a worthwhile investment in time and effort. I've viewed multiple videos and had experiences with friends of mine who've noticed average framerate increases from 10-15 fps in titles like Total War Attila and Rome 2. I love the total war series and it's quite CPU intensive--CPU clock frequency increases generate framerate increases at a higher rate than GPU-bottlenecked titles.
My budget is $1500.
That's why I'd like to know if I can safely cut $ from the motherboard to spend more on a graphics card. I just don't know if the higher-end Z170 motherboards yield better overclockability on an I7 6700k than the lower end motherboards.
It highly depends on how deeply and serious you want to go into overclocking. If you just want to bump the multiplier and increase the voltage a bit like you said above. Then basicly any moderate Z170 board will be fine for doing so. The more higherend enthusiast grade boards like the The ROG Formula / Extreme, Asrock OC Formula, Gigabyte Soc boards etc are designed for the enthusiast overclockers who realy need all the bells and whisles to fine tune an overclock, to squeeze every last drop of performance out of their cpu´s.
Allthough i have to say that the Asrock Z170 OC Formula is a very sollid board for a good price. But yeah its black yellow.
If you are looking for a decent midrange Z170 board which can do some nice moderate overclocking, and which is a bit geared to wards gamers. Then the Asus Maximus VIII Hero would be a very good choice.
Yeah MisteryAngel, And since I'm looking for fairly straightforward and easy overclocking of the cpu, I'm thinking more money placed into the motherboard will not result in noticeable framerate increases in gaming.
Well if you're playing CPU intensives then ya maybe worth the 10% performance bump to go for like the 6700K, ARMA needs a strong CPU as well.
For the most part though I'd still say go for a 5820K given that budget so you never have to worry about your CPU, it makes more sense to OC since it only turbos to 3.6ghz, but ya it would be overkill for just gaming.
however if you consider that if you're going to spend a bunch on your motherboard anyways, the 5820K costs about the same as the 6700K, and you could get the really sweet X99 sabertooth board with it, which even has a tiny dedicated fan for the VRMs.
Well ya, but if one is already going to spend a ton, might as well spend a bit more of the budget on the CPU platform so it's never going to be an issue.
Well the 6700K performs better in gaming then the 5820K, next to that it also consumes way less power, and produces way less heat. The 6700K is therefor way more efficient if the main focus is gaming and ordernairy desktop tasks. The only time i could realy recommend X99 5820K over the 6700K, is wenn you do allot of productivity workload next to gaming. But still in productivity the 6700K wont do bad either.
This of course does not mean that the 5820K is a bad choice by all means. But i think that i would recommend to pick the 6700K in this case, if the main focus is gaming.