Why do you care that much about those high memory clocks?
Also $150,- mobo isnt realistic in a $500 / $600,- budget build.
Also there are only 2 skylake chips 6600k and 6700k atm.
unless you can up your budget ofc.
Yeah, building one atm, it's basically a $1000 build at this point. It's quite frustrating. And all i'd want out of it is an EVGA GTX 960. Really solid card.
Honestly, I would go with something like the a8 7600 for a build like this. You don't really need the extra cpu power for anything. As far as I can tell, you are mainly doing basic stuff. An APU will give you the option of some light gaming. I would say a balanced build at that price range would be something like an a8 7600 and a decent ssd.
EDIT: I built a rig in a similar price range as this for a friend that was also mini ITX. 850 evo, 1tb storage hdd, a8 7600, decent gold rated psu, 8gb ram. I would go for something like that.
Getting skylake is fairly pointless if you're just gaming
It seems the 290 is going to be about the card to get for now, it's nearing 200 dollars again
Where are you seeing a 290x for $200?
Sorry, 290, $240, 220 with MIR, but the rebate doesn't matter
https://pcpartpicker.com/part/powercolor-video-card-axr92904gbd5tdheoc
Also there's some refurbished Sapphire 290s for $220
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202146&cm_re=290-_-14-202-146-_-Product
If you're not gaming, I would wait for the other skylake SKUs to launch and pick up an i3. the graphics will be as good and possibly better than what AMD offers with their APUs, and the i3 will stomp on the 860k/7850k. plus, it gives you an upgrade path for the future since LGA1151 will be supported for Kabi Lake(or whatever Intel's next generation CPU's are called).
I've decided to hold off on the build until Zen comes out. I think it'll be more than worth the wait. Budget will probably increase to 7 or $800. I'm just having my fingers crossed for HBM to be more commonplace in a 9-11 month timeframe. I love how it allows AMD to make very compact cards with lower temperatures. The R9 NANO. WOAH!
I can't wait to see what AMD have on offer with Zen. They were extremely lenient with the amount of cores on offer with the Vishera CPUs. I'm hoping they'll do the same, here. A huge single core performance increase. And i'll get a 6-core if they offer one.
However, One thing still irks me. It's all a matter of form factor. As i've said in the initial post, i wanted to build something compact leading up to a nasty ATX or Full tower build. But the Node 202's storage options seem a little limited. Then again, at the same time... One drive and one SSD really seems to be adequate for me. I'm can't think of why i'd need more drives. One for main storage, one for the quick OS boot.
And ultimately.. yeah, two full towers, or a full tower and a Mid tower on the same desk is quite insane...
The mini ITX case from Fractal would be around half as high as the lower case. Cases are a fractal 3500 windowless and a fractal 2500. I had the aluminium extrusions laying around, if not I'd have used wood.
You could try getting a small mATX case for now and a mini-ITX motherboard. Once you upgrade to Zen or what have you, you could migrate that to an mini-ITX case and put your drives in a full-size ATX case. Something like a fractal core costs around 50 units of your local currency (dropping another 75 on a mini-ITX come upgrade time seems reasonable with your estimate of a 2-3k $ build).
A bit like having your cake and eating it and then ordering even more cake.
I think you've got it a bit twisted, unless i'm reading it wrong. I'm planning on making this first, initial build a mini ITX. THEN making my productivity/beast build a full tower, or possibly mid tower.
Have you heard of any mid tower cases which are known to be compact? The Define R5 is beautiful, and the noise dampening foam is also a bonus. But it seems like it's basically a standard-sized, if not slights larger - mid tower case.
Gotcha.
The Define Mini is 5cm shorter (as in: not as tall) than the Define R5 (still it's ATX), i.e. 395mm (15,5 inches).
If you can bear the German have a look: mATX, gedÀmmt (meaning insulated, i.e. noise dampened), between 100 and 200 mm wide (Category is "Breite" in German), betweeen 200 and 300mm in height ("Höhe"), look here for a selection.
Yeah, i'm so picky when it comes to cases, and i'm always thinking about how i can bring a case into the future. The Define series are very simple but nice looking. Ever since i saw the NZXT Phantom 820, i fell in love with it. It's amazing. I just don't know if it'd hold out in the long run. In terms of looks? Probably not, because the Define have such a timeless, simple design to them. I LOVE the features of the Phantom 820, though. Controlling the speed of EVERY individual fan. The lights are pretty cool, too. And before the Phantom, i couldn't stop thinking about the Level 10 GT, and before that... probably the CM HAF-X.
Also, jumping back to motherboards. I can't seem to find any mobos with a thunderbolt connector. I'm in College right now, and they gave me a 1TB external drive which has an INCREDIBLY shoddy (and slow, of course) USB 2.0 connector. And a Thunderbolt connector. Thunderbolt is incredibly fast, and i love the speed. But the thought of having to back everything up with USB 2.0 is a NIGHTMARE once i build a new PC. The system i have now is whoopty as hell, so i'll have no choice but to back everything up with USB 2.0. But once i'm moving everything onto the new system, hopefully, i'll have the convenience of doing it all with Thunderbolt. What are my options, here?
MINI ITX! WOOOOT! I would recommend the NCASE M1 or even if you have sometime to wait the DAN A4
Your options are, sadly only mATX, there are no mini-ITX boards with thunderbolt (and retrofitting one with a thunderbolt PCIe card would be stupid because it would have no free slot for a dedicated GPU. Sadly there are no usb 3.0 to thunderbolt adapters either.
As for ATX or mATX motherboards: youp they are are available in nearly every pricerange for 1150 (well except low-low end) and on a lot of X99 and Z170 boards.
Hmm, i'm only finding In Win slim mATX cases. They're in the same, console-look style as the Node 202. If only fractal made mATX slimline cases. The whole cube thing is a big no-no for me. I can't stand those style of cases. The in Win cases that are on Newegg look like just the kind of thing i'd buy, but In Win ain't Fractal or NZXT.
I'd be fine ditching the whole ITX idea, if i could find something compact. mATX is still small, but it seems like another one of those instances where you try and find a solution, only for it to say 'screw you' - because you realize that what you want isn't even made.
I saw the Lian Li PC-O series. The PC-04 is an ITX, then i saw the mATX PC-05... then i saw its price.