Best motherboard for an i7-6700k

[msadiq987]

Hi, I am looking for a good motherboard for the i7-6700k in the price regions of about £80-£120.
I need at least 1 m.2 slot. I have a NZXT S340 Elite case and GTX 1060 6GB on the way. I will be using 16gb of DDR4 RAM and will want to upgrade to 32GB in the future. Thanks.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Do you have a preferred color scheme, or color is irrelevant?

 

[msadiq987]

Do you have a preferred color scheme, or color is irrelevant?

To me, colour is not really relevant, anything that isn't white is good.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Then I would highly recommend this. I've been using the Gaming 5 along with my 6700k, since pretty much days after the release of Skylake, and have been extremely happy with the results, performance and feature set.

The Gaming 7 is basically the exact same board, with some additional features and aesthetics.

Not recommending Z270 boards for Skylake processors at this point, because they are almost twice the price in some cases, and don't really offer much in the way of additional features aside from obviously supporting Kaby Lake processors out of the box. Since there is little reason to upgrade from Skylake to Kaby lake, at any point, that seems like a poor reason to consider Z270.

There ARE four additional PCIe 3.0 lanes on Z270, but unless you plan to run a few M.2 drives or multiple graphics cards AND M.2, this is probably not a big plus for most users either.

For Skylake, Z270 is fine, but so is Z170, and it's cheaper.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£119.95 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £119.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-03 23:04 GMT+0000

 

[msadiq987]

Then I would highly recommend this. I've been using the Gaming 5 along with my 6700k, since pretty much days after the release of Skylake, and have been extremely happy with the results, performance and feature set.

The Gaming 7 is basically the exact same board, with some additional features and aesthetics.

Not recommending Z270 boards for Skylake processors at this point, because they are almost twice the price in some cases, and don't really offer much in the way of additional features aside from obviously supporting Kaby Lake processors out of the box. Since there is little reason to upgrade from Skylake to Kaby lake, at any point, that seems like a poor reason to consider Z270.

There ARE four additional PCIe 3.0 lanes on Z270, but unless you plan to run a few M.2 drives or multiple graphics cards AND M.2, this is probably not a big plus for most users either.

For Skylake, Z270 is fine, but so is Z170, and it's cheaper.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

Motherboard: Gigabyte - GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£119.95 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £119.95
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-11-03 23:04 GMT+0000

What would you say about these?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-Z170-GAMING-Socket-Express-Motherboard/dp/B01AUSEBHE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1507751552&sr=8-1&keywords=lga1151+motherboard
https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Z170-Skylake-CrossFire-Motherboard/dp/B0126R2LBK/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1509473574&sr=8-4&keywords=z170
The second one looks awesome in my opinion

 

[Darkbreeze]

In order of preference, I'd go ASUS Maximus Hero VIII, Gaming 7, Z170-A and then Gaming K3. All are good boards, but you get what you pay for, as with most things, however the Z170-A has features you usually only find on much higher end ROG boards, so for the price, if you don't mind the plain aesthetics, it's a really good choice.

Only problem with that board really is the fact that the style of IO shield it uses makes it fairly hard to install, as it tries to get in the way and not go where it needs to during the installation. I saw this before ever doing a build with one, ignored it, and found it to be true after all.

It's still a value segment motherboard : I might be nitpicking, but there are some parts of the board I feel could be better, and that is probably due to the board's low price point. The first is the IO shield that has huge hanging grounding fins that make it hard to install. The fins that stick out can easily slip into a slot, and they did, I had to mount the board twice with multiple tries to get it right. There are also only three LEDs that illuminate the PCB divide, which doesn't provide great illumination; you have to kind of stick your head in the case to see the lighting.

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7506/asus-z170-intel-motherboard-review/index11.html

It does have M.2 though, which is nice on a budget board. It also has Intel NIC, which again is normally not found on budget boards because ASUS has to pay a premium to include this on any boards it wishes to use it on.

It also has a very good UEFI bios interface. All of this is mentioned in the review at the link above, but I can verify it all to be accurate based on my own experience with this board.

My short list of choices when building with Skylake, and not going overboard to an extreme model, would easily be limited to the Gigabyte Z170x-gaming 3, gaming 5 and gaming 7, the ASUS Z170-A and the ASUS Maximus VIII Hero. All have the features you wanted, all are very reliable and are built using high quality components and all are fairly reasonably priced. These boards are solid choices.

The only problem with the Gaming 3 and SFAIK the K3, is that they are limited by the exclusion of a few perks like additional fan headers, slightly worse performing/vanilla flavored network controllers, etc.

One thing possibly worth mentioning is that the Gaming 3 has a U.2 slot in addition to an M.2 slot, which, unless I'm mistaken, means this board could potentially support the new Intel Optane memory drives, but I'd have to look into that further to verify. Pretty sure they are mainly U.2 compliant though. For mixed workloads, the Optane drives are very compelling but they are also very expensive compared to M.2 NVME drives like the Samsung 960 Evo and Pro. I'm definitely adding one of those fairly soon if at all possible.

 

[msadiq987]

In order of preference, I'd go ASUS Maximus Hero VIII, Gaming 7, Z170-A and then Gaming K3. All are good boards, but you get what you pay for, as with most things, however the Z170-A has features you usually only find on much higher end ROG boards, so for the price, if you don't mind the plain aesthetics, it's a really good choice.

Only problem with that board really is the fact that the style of IO shield it uses makes it fairly hard to install, as it tries to get in the way and not go where it needs to during the installation. I saw this before ever doing a build with one, ignored it, and found it to be true after all.

It's still a value segment motherboard : I might be nitpicking, but there are some parts of the board I feel could be better, and that is probably due to the board's low price point. The first is the IO shield that has huge hanging grounding fins that make it hard to install. The fins that stick out can easily slip into a slot, and they did, I had to mount the board twice with multiple tries to get it right. There are also only three LEDs that illuminate the PCB divide, which doesn't provide great illumination; you have to kind of stick your head in the case to see the lighting.

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/7506/asus-z170-intel-motherboard-review/index11.html

It does have M.2 though, which is nice on a budget board. It also has Intel NIC, which again is normally not found on budget boards because ASUS has to pay a premium to include this on any boards it wishes to use it on.

It also has a very good UEFI bios interface. All of this is mentioned in the review at the link above, but I can verify it all to be accurate based on my own experience with this board.

My short list of choices when building with Skylake, and not going overboard to an extreme model, would easily be limited to the Gigabyte Z170x-gaming 3, gaming 5 and gaming 7, the ASUS Z170-A and the ASUS Maximus VIII Hero. All have the features you wanted, all are very reliable and are built using high quality components and all are fairly reasonably priced. These boards are solid choices.

The only problem with the Gaming 3 and SFAIK the K3, is that they are limited by the exclusion of a few perks like additional fan headers, slightly worse performing/vanilla flavored network controllers, etc.

One thing possibly worth mentioning is that the Gaming 3 has a U.2 slot in addition to an M.2 slot, which, unless I'm mistaken, means this board could potentially support the new Intel Optane memory drives, but I'd have to look into that further to verify. Pretty sure they are mainly U.2 compliant though. For mixed workloads, the Optane drives are very compelling but they are also very expensive compared to M.2 NVME drives like the Samsung 960 Evo and Pro. I'm definitely adding one of those fairly soon if at all possible.

Thanks for your help

 

[Darkbreeze]

Anytime.