QOTW: Z170 or X99 - which would you choose for a high-end rig?

[artcon]

x99 as I do some video editing/photoshopping as well as gaming - all those PCIe lanes are nice. If I only gamed, then Skylake. Obviously if your budget is more limited then there's not much point upgrading depending on where you're coming from. But I'm assuming 'high-end rig' means bigger budget. But if you're the type to upgrade your PC often then you'd go for at least one of these since the sockets before and DDR3 RAM are dead.

[kalniel]

Asus has refreshed a lot of their X99 boards with USB3.1.

Nice, are any of them type-C?

[shaithis]

I have just upgraded to X99, took this route for the PCIe lanes. Have 2 980 ti's being surved with 16 lanes each... yummy

Which makes no difference at all over running them at 8x PCI-E 3.0 or 16x PCI-E 2.0

In other words you have spent an extra 200-300ukp for less than 1 FPS increase.

[WritersBlock]

Not exciting enough to make it worth while.

[MRFS]

Neither: I'm frankly waiting for an add-on NVMe RAID controller, with the same wiring topology as the Highpoint RocketRAID 2720SGL (2 x SFF-8087 ports fanning to 8 data cables). With an x16 edge connector at PCIe 3.0 bandwidth, the raw upstream bandwidth should be 16GB/s, increasing to 32GB/s when PCIe 4.0's clock rate increases from 8GHz to 16GHz. Then, if Intel's original intent for PCI-Express is to be maintained, such a controller should be plug-compatible with existing PCIe 3.0 chipsets. If the industry can deliver superior upstream bandwidth for multiple video cards, at a minimum they should be doing the same for users who have a real need for unusually high storage speeds. One problem with current 2.5" NVMe SSDs is that each requires x4 PCIe lanes: at that rate, 8 U.2 cables will consume 32 PCIe lanes. So hardware designers should be considering solutions like bridge chips e.g. PLX. The goal of this analysis is to design, build and "future-proof" a system which supports, at a minimum, all current levels of RAID arrays e.g. RAID-5 and RAID-6, using 4 to 8 x 2.5" NVMe SSDs -- to realize the proven stability and reliability of these higher RAID levels -- all of which are bootable. The OS definitely needs hosting on all such RAID levels. Ultimately, I foresee motherboards with "native" support for some mix of SATA (or SAS) -and- U.2 ports, without needing to purchase any add-on cards. (Forgive me for rambling, but the above is what I'm waiting for.)

[aidanjt]

Nice, are any of them type-C?

Sadly not. The refreshes hit the shelves way back in February before type-C materialised.

[kalniel]

Sadly not. The refreshes hit the shelves way back in February before type-C materialised.

Thanks. I looked into it some more - while Asus put the controller onboard, ASRock are providing an add in card, one variant of which has both type-A and type-C so I might look for that (or just buy an add in card separately I guess). Oh so tempting to get an X99 now...

[Madman54655]

X99, I could use some more cores.

[KeyboardDemon]

I've been thinking about this question for a while now, and after looking at the results I was quite pleasantly surprised by what I had found.

Firstly Z170 has some great new features that I would surely like to have but they come at a price, to use the platform to its full potential I would need to get some DDR4 RAM, an m.6 SSD drive would be awesome too, then of course with the cost of the mobo and CPU I would be looking at around £600 plus. In terms of performance gains that I would get from the £600 investment, I don't think it's as big as the performance gains I would get from swapping out my 780 Ti for an EVGA GTX 980 Ti Classified edition card which would work out about the same in terms of costs.

[Mr_Supportman]

As a person whos gameing PC still works after ages playing modern games, i have to say the intel 775 socket with a dual core and asus motherboard that never gives up kicks ass <3 will probably go for the Z170 if my baby ever gives up on me tho.

[thanos999]

i hope to start a x99 build

[kellyharding]

Just about to put together a Z170 build with a 6700K. X99 was just the wrong side of affordable so with finding a couple of cracking deals went with Z170/6700K/GTX970 and the money saved went into a bigger/faster SSD and more memory.

As I'm going from a E6550/P45/GTX480 with 4Gb ram I suspect I'm in for a nice speed bump

[1kca]

Just about to put together a Z170 build with a 6700K. X99 was just the wrong side of affordable so with finding a couple of cracking deals went with Z170/6700K/GTX970 and the money saved went into a bigger/faster SSD and more memory.

As I'm going from a E6550/P45/GTX480 with 4Gb ram I suspect I'm in for a nice speed bump

That's a solid system. You're going to be really happy with that build. I would have gone for a 390/390x as opposed to the 970 if i was building a new Win10/DX12 system now but still, a very noticable step up from your previous system. Enjoy the upgrade