So I'm in the market for an ASUS skylake board. Looking at the Maximus VIII hero and Ranger boards. How is the stability of the boards and quality of the drivers under windows 10 for these boards today. I see a lot of negative feedback on newegg and amazon reviews, I rather hear it from you guys than trust amazon reviews.
This would be the best skylake board to get, least for the money, it has a full IO with USB 3.1 and Type C at $65
Given that skylake only has a 65W TDP, a high end board really isn't going to be worth it overall I don't think.
https://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gah110ms2hp
What board you want depends on what you're going to do with it.
What CPU do you want, are you going to overclock, stuff like that.
CPU i5-6600k I might OC it to 4.0Ghz. But I'm looking making a mid-range gaming machine for MMOs like FFXIV. The rig is going to be at my house with my mother, I want something stable so I don't have to spend much time troubleshooting things with my busy schedule with the military. As for the suggested motherboard Streetguru posted, I rather the two ASUS boards I posted above (Maximus VIII Hero/Ranger) due to the larger amount of USB ports and I like ASUS' work.
With a mild overclock like that you might be better served with a Asus 170z e or a comparable board from MSI or gigabyte you will get the same connectivity options and a very stable platform for a good amount less money at the expense of a slighty less overbuilt vrm setup
Price aside, how is skylake as a platform today with the ASUS and Gigabyte boards in terms of stability.
Skylake suffers in long term stress testing under prime95 only a handful of boards can run for more than 24 hours gigabyte and Asus 's high end stuff have so far been the best but unless you plan on constantly running rendering or stress tests it should never be a problem. I believe the mid teir mobos are competitive with each other, I have always had good experiences with Asus, and Evga, always problems with msi and gigabyte
Asus Maximuss VIII Hero is a decent board.
decent build quality, drivers are fine.
Here is a very informative review about the board.
uh?
A semi or highend board with decent vrm design, will definitely be worth it if you want to overclock.
But overclocking in itself isn't really worth it, it's like an extra $100+ for 10% more CPU performance, maybe 15% at best, better off with a better GPU or something
Quality of a motherboard allways matter.
Overclocking is also worth it with skylake, especialy with higherend gpu´s.
But the 6700 already has a turbo of 4ghz, it's like overclocking a 6700K to 4.5ghz is going to be worth it at all for gaming aside from maybe 144hz gaming.
and given that the 6700 only has a 65W TDP, the more budget boards can easily handle the higher end chips
TDP has nothing to do with that.
TDP stands for thermal design a power,
a number measured in watts of which a cooling solution must be capable to dissipate from the cpu at stock speeds.
THe 6700K under full stress will consume way more power then that.
It is fairly power efficient though, it's not like the FX chips where you almost have to buy a higher end board to give them proper power delivery
Skylake needs a decent power delivery aswell, if you want to overclock it.
Especialy bclk.
Of course a midrange board will also overclock fine.
But still, you dont want to cheap out on a motherboard if you grab a unlocked K cpu imo.
If one were to overclock ya, but that money is going to be better spent elsewhere most times, an i5 6500/6600K is already most than capable for gaming.
right that's why you'd back off to a 6500 or 6700 with a budget board that can handle it
that depends on if you are happy with a locked cpu, and dont care about overclocking indeed.
I've read several of the ASUS Z170 board reviews and the skylake reviews. But these reviews were released at the time of launch. I'm more curious how the platform is today.
The platform as improved some, mostly in better DDR4 support which helps with stability, also don't listen to this nonsense about grossly over-designed VRMs a 6-8 phase is more then capable with Skylake. Skylake just doesn't use much power. As a practical matter these mother boards with a 16 phase design are such overkill, you will never need that much power delivered. You get no real benefit with them, they will not allow for better overclocks because it isn't voltage or heat that is limiting the overclock its the chipset hitting its max at sane voltages. The problems with the Skylake platform stability wise seem to be related to DDR4 sub timings, the IMCs of the chipset, audio latency, little non sense things. These problems are largely bios and software issues and some have already been worked out.
So rare to find non-bs and straight to the point reviews today, thank you. As for the other bits you said in regards to price and features. I'm making a military themed pc and atm the Asus rog and sabertooth mobos are fitting that billet right now. I am concerned about using a 950 pro drive with the sabertooth from reviews I have heard that the drives heat up more with that board with the way it's designed causing performance hits.