Let me enlighten everyone with a couple of practical examples :
On the left side of the ring we have the Asrock b150 skylake overclocker (not the one that's an optimal price point buy that one is only out in europe and hasn't arrived to US still bummer h170 pro4/hyper or b150a-x1)
So conclusions : not as big price difference as we'd hoped, msi one is competitive, the asrock answer to this to make the difference $25-$30 has not yet arrived.
Differences between the two :
Sound :
They have the same audio chip as the base with the B150 asrock having better dac, amplifier, better and more capacitors to enchance the same ALC1150 Realtek audio chip which is the best implemented for 99.9999% of all motherboard in skylake generation.
Lan :
Asrock has the killer e2400 while msi hasIntel® I219-V. Now u could say killer has had bloatware and intel's just works better (notice the past tense). They are exactly the same. If you for personal reasons do not like the killer bloatware, you can download the lan driver without it thus making both chips compete on equal ground. What's interesting to note is that msi puts the killer e2400 chip on pretty 50% of all of its motherboards that are more expensive than this msi motherboard. Conclusion msi thinks there's no notable difference.
USB :
Asrock doesn't have 3.1, MSI has 3.1+1 is type c. If you have use of this and/or know u will need it in the future u should the MSI. However with a little bit of thinking for 95% of the people this turns into wasted money for stuff that im not gonna use until at least my next build:
Storage :
Both support NVMe as boot, and m.2. asrock doesn't have u.2 support, you would have to get the $120 h170 model for that. Again a fringe case (just fluff on paper). But if you're already min-maxing here, will you really have usb 3.1 and NVMe and u.2 devices which cost a hefty premium ?. No you won't you payed more for the capability on the if-case u might or might need it in the future when you have loads more money that you now. Not very fiscally responsible for the present is it ?
Graphics + add-on cards :
ASrock has 1 PCI-e slot less of each kind than MSI. using 1 single GPU ?, not difference whatsover.
Power delievery :
ASrock has 10 phases, MSI has 8 phases. asrock has better components overall, except for reinforced pci-e slots, and better and higher quality phase delivery system.
Both motherboard have specific color scheme, which means if you're picky you would not be comparing this z170 to this b150 and vice versa.
And that's it.
Next time i'll give a comparison on how a b150-d3h microATX gigabyte motherboard @ $68 fares to a z170-d3h microATX gigabyte motherboard @ $113.
Thus not only skipping the troublesome pain in the neck for other motherboard companies (Asrock), and figuring out how Malaboga calculated this $113-$68 as $10 difference, ...
Whether a specific motherboard will have any of these is UNRELATED to the CHIPSET. This is the whole point of my walls of text. You auto-assume that because its a z170 it will have some or all better of the above, because it has been this way in the previous years. BUT It's not the PRECEDENT. They only things that they will lack is what's not on the chipset itself. Anything else that can be put on a z170 can be put a b150/h170, ...
You have a good point here - it is not directly related to the chipset. There are some nice B and H motherboards out there. But there are a lot more nice Z-class boards than B and H ones. There are some Z boards that are pretty basic, but most are going to be fairly decent. The opposite is more or less true of B/H boards - most are pretty basic, but there are some that are fairly descent.
Yes, you can seriously overpay for a Z-board. But you can seriously overpay for any board, that really doesn't matter.
You have convinced me - I may look at particular B-series chipsets, if linked, and certain models may be up to snuff. But in general, I do consider them to be largely of a lower caliber than I would suggest putting in with an Intel CPU.
Kinda like there ~can~ be nice Toyotas, but you have to look out for exactly what you are buying. But if you jump up to the Lexus, it'll probably be fairly nice no matter which you pick.
A. personal opinion, there's more PCs i3, i5-6400/6500/6600 combined then 6600k/6700k so people do find it an attractive buy. being smart+savvy+logical+informed and not get the advertised motherboard and "kickass" parts, but get 95% of what we need for less than 95% of the price of what's advertised that we should buy, ...
And among consumer desktops with less than 100 GB in storage used, I'd bet that there are more with a larger than 1 TB hard drive than have an SSD of any size. Just because a lot of people buy something doesn't automatically mean it's sensible.
In the case of the Core i5-6400 or 6500, you give up too much performance for not enough price savings as compared to the 6600. 3.3 GHz is an awfully long way away from 3.9 GHz.
Just because a lot of people buy something is an example(and not the only one), and not my reason nor explanation.
You either have A. you are overclocking the 6400/6500 on a $15-$35 cheaper motherboard with better overclocking capabilities and this is unimportant.
or B. would you look at that it doesn't actually make that much of a difference for the stuff i'm using the machine for, for example gaming.
The fps difference compared to $ saved is hard to compare due to choice of games and other stuff a person would do, but a averages from reviewers off youtube and on youtube pretty much prove the difference is not that big (unless you're exclusively playing cpu intensive mmos) in which case there's a bigger difference, but still not enough to warrant the expense on a tight budget.
Numbers that make less difference than their mathematical disparity are how relevant again ? IPC is less important than GHz or ? (of course we're ignoring the variability of turbo/boost, and you forgot to mention that 6500-6600k is actually only 3.6GHz-3.9GHz, no biggie just don't let it happen again)
Just for fun lets go for C, let me put myself in other people's shoes, ignore my default belief system and brain settings in favour of out the box comparative thinking, and say all that i wrote above in this post is bollocks, and drop you this little gem :
How many brain gymnastics does it take to justify spending the additional money over the 6500 without a significantly higher budget cap ?
Am i the only one between the 3 of us, and more people eventually when they read these posts, who sees a sneaky financial pattern here ?
we've got $15-$45 difference on mobo $25-$50 difference on cpu, then a over-the-top ~$20 CPU cooler difference, $15-$20 pointless disk drive, ~$30 PSU difference, etc ...
Am i the only one who seems to notice the insanely huge money waste going on here, that can be funneled for a 960 to a 970 gpu difference ???
And then suddenly people who were advised that their budget will never, ever never accommodate a 970 over 960 can by the miracle of fiscal responsibility and smart planning suddenly get it !, ...
P.S. @ Aethaeryn
Are you maybe possible, slightly just a little bit, regretting that u asked me for an explanation :P and secretly wishing all these walls of text could magically transform into a blog post with nice pictures, graphs, nifty comparison and/or a linus youtube video (or anyone elses who dabbles in hardware)
I know i am regretting a bit just tiny, whiny, slightly that i have 40% less hours to sleep now because i indeed did not have the time to write all of this
and it's still missing eu to us price comparison, another 8 motherboards preliminary comparison, and then at least 6 in-depth motherboard comparison with exactly vrm and all other mobo parts quality and quantity comparison taken from at least 2 dozen reviews, and hundreds of enthusiast forum posts, ... with 5 youtube 5 non-youtube 6500-6600-6600k non-overclock, overclock comparisons and advice from one the best germany's professional OC people (specifically about BCLK OC), etc, ...
You have a good point here - it is not directly related to the chipset. There are some nice B and H motherboards out there. But there are a lot more nice Z-class boards than B and H ones. There are some Z boards that are pretty basic, but most are going to be fairly decent. The opposite is more or less true of B/H boards - most are pretty basic, but there are some that are fairly descent.
Yes, you can seriously overpay for a Z-board. But you can seriously overpay for any board, that really doesn't matter.
You have convinced me - I may look at particular B-series chipsets, if linked, and certain models may be up to snuff. But in general, I do consider them to be largely of a lower caliber than I would suggest putting in with an Intel CPU.
Kinda like there ~can~ be nice Toyotas, but you have to look out for exactly what you are buying. But if you jump up to the Lexus, it'll probably be fairly nice no matter which you pick.
The motherboard companies have really outdone themselves with budget chipset motherboards on skylake generation. I was even more sceptical and confused than you when i first encountered it.
Some random guy on some random mediocre forum in my native language mentioned this when they skylake b150/h170s first came out, and i was, what is this cheapass talking about, he's gonna ruin people's builds at this rate.
But i was curious, so i checked a bit, then some time passed, i checked a bit again, then some people presented some compelling evidence, and before you know it, i was literally speechless.
You had all these b150 motherboards which made h170 completely obsolete (100% a few months after launch, less now, someone noticed it was making no sense and convinced mobo makers to lower h170 prices and add more fluff :P)
And then you had b150 motherboards which gave <$200 z170 a run for their money. It was a whole new world (again someone noticed this and told the mobo makers to stop losing money and lowered the gap a bit xD)
At one point it was so bad that it was, you either get gigabyte z170-ud3 or u get a b150 motherboard. From a pure utilitarian and practical standpoint, this was the only motherboard u needed to put a 6600k/6700k and do 99% of the max OC. It was crazy.
But yeah, in your last paragraph you're completely right, you have to know what you're looking for, and what exactly you're buying, same like you can get any seasonic power supply, and call it a day, but with some other, oh boy, research, research, research
I mean look at this, it's the 2nd or 3rd cheapest b150 motherboard :http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128874 It's the first one that's not complete shit, and it has 4 ram slots (how ?), VRM heatsink power delivery cooling (wtf ?), its even better than the asrock one and the same one from the $50 more expensive z170-d3h.
Look at this sweet motherboard, it was %30 of a while ago, that was the best buy from -$75 to +$75 from its price, just look how much they had to drop the z170s, the krait was like $220 or something a couple of months after it came out now its $150.
Quizzical you got the krait didn't you ? do you remember how much you payed for it and when roughly did u get it ?
You have a good point here - it is not directly related to the chipset. There are some nice B and H motherboards out there. But there are a lot more nice Z-class boards than B and H ones. There are some Z boards that are pretty basic, but most are going to be fairly decent. The opposite is more or less true of B/H boards - most are pretty basic, but there are some that are fairly descent.
Yes, you can seriously overpay for a Z-board. But you can seriously overpay for any board, that really doesn't matter.
You have convinced me - I may look at particular B-series chipsets, if linked, and certain models may be up to snuff. But in general, I do consider them to be largely of a lower caliber than I would suggest putting in with an Intel CPU.
Kinda like there ~can~ be nice Toyotas, but you have to look out for exactly what you are buying. But if you jump up to the Lexus, it'll probably be fairly nice no matter which you pick.
The motherboard companies have really outdone themselves with budget chipset motherboards on skylake generation. I was even more sceptical and confused than you when i first encountered it.
Some random guy on some random mediocre forum in my native language mentioned this when they skylake b150/h170s first came out, and i was, what is this cheapass talking about, he's gonna ruin people's builds at this rate.
But i was curious, so i checked a bit, then some time passed, i checked a bit again, then some people presented some compelling evidence, and before you know it, i was literally speechless.
You had all these b150 motherboards which made h170 completely obsolete (100% a few months after launch, less now, someone noticed it was making no sense and convinced mobo makers to lower h170 prices and add more fluff :P)
And then you had b150 motherboards which gave <$200 z170 a run for their money. It was a whole new world (again someone noticed this and told the mobo makers to stop losing money and lowered the gap a bit xD)
At one point it was so bad that it was, you either get gigabyte z170-ud3 or u get a b150 motherboard. From a pure utilitarian and practical standpoint, this was the only motherboard u needed to put a 6600k/6700k and do 99% of the max OC. It was crazy.
But yeah, in your last paragraph you're completely right, you have to know what you're looking for, and what exactly you're buying, same like you can get any seasonic power supply, and call it a day, but with some other, oh boy, research, research, research
I mean look at this, it's the 2nd or 3rd cheapest b150 motherboard :http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128874 It's the first one that's not complete shit, and it has 4 ram slots (how ?), VRM heatsink power delivery cooling (wtf ?), its even better than the asrock one and the same one from the $50 more expensive z170-d3h.
Look at this sweet motherboard, it was %30 of a while ago, that was the best buy from -$75 to +$75 from its price, just look how much they had to drop the z170s, the krait was like $220 or something a couple of months after it came out now its $150.
Quizzical you got the krait didn't you ? do you remember how much you payed for it and when roughly did u get it ?
A Core i5-6500 will tend to be closer in performance to a Core i7-3770 than to a Core i5-6600. The price difference between the 6500 and the 6600 is $25. Because the 3770 doesn't require the original poster to buy a new motherboard or new memory and doesn't invalidate the OS license, the price difference between a 6500 and a 3770 is certainly over $100 and may be over $200. If you're going to pay that huge price difference for the modest gains of the 6500 over a 3770 (and the 3770 will beat a 6500 quite a bit, too), why not pay an extra $25 to more than double your performance gains?
On the motherboard, I'm not arguing that he should get a Z170. I'm arguing against that and a B150 for the same reason: it's better to keep the motherboard he has unless he gets a larger budget.
On the motherboard, I got a Core i7-4790K because I gave up on waiting for Sky Lake. So I have an MSI Z97 Gaming 7 or something like that. The only way to get the Fury X on New Egg at the time was as part of a combo deal, so I got the motherboard that was part of the combo deal.
You could do a dual Xeon 16 core 32 thread setup for 600-700$. I'm thinking about doing one myself.
Considering that the CPUs are $1500 each, you're not getting that new on a $600 budget unless you find them on clearance used. And they're not even reasonable CPUs for gaming use, with a max turbo boost of only 3.3 GHz, and that's the old Sandy Bridge, so IPC isn't the greatest by today's standards, either.
Worse, scaling to multiple sockets isn't like scaling to multiple cores. For server loads built for it, it's fine. But for consumer programs not built to use multiple sockets intelligently, a two-socket system can sometimes have its performance improved by removing one of the CPUs to make it a one-socket system.
You could do a dual Xeon 16 core 32 thread setup for 600-700$. I'm thinking about doing one myself.
Considering that the CPUs are $1500 each, you're not getting that new on a $600 budget unless you find them on clearance used. And they're not even reasonable CPUs for gaming use, with a max turbo boost of only 3.3 GHz, and that's the old Sandy Bridge, so IPC isn't the greatest by today's standards, either.
Worse, scaling to multiple sockets isn't like scaling to multiple cores. For server loads built for it, it's fine. But for consumer programs not built to use multiple sockets intelligently, a two-socket system can sometimes have its performance improved by removing one of the CPUs to make it a one-socket system.
The cpus are going for 60-70$ each, used but meh. And even if you only go with a single cpu it's still 8c/16t. It shows in the video various games running at 1440p and they're all 50 fps+.
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
While the Catalyst to Crimson conversion did cause some issues, your situation of "nothing but trouble" is certainly not the norm. I have no idea what specific issues you had. I only mention it because Nvidia isn't without driver issues either. Many had major issues with Windows 10, for example, that took months for Nvidia to correct. These aren't the 1900 xt days where it took 6 months for ATi to straighten out driver issues. There are some things I would argue AMD does better than Nvidia on the driver front as well. AMD tends to support their cards for far longer than Nvidia does. The 7970 for example is still a strong card while the 680 from the same era was long ago abandoned.
Given the state of the latest Crimson drivers from AMD I'd go for a 960 or a 970 if you can stretch that far. I've had nothing but trouble since they changed from catalyst to crimson, so I finally caved and bought a 970. Boy am I happy now.
1080p @ 60fps on high/ultra settings playing anything you can throw at it. That's with an i5 4690k and 16Gb RAM on a cheap MSI z97 mainboard. Nothing OC'd either, straight out of the box.
youve made a great mistake because NVidia drivers in 2016. are absoltutely terrible and i cant wait to go back to AMD from 970 and good luck with DX12, NVidia doesnt seem to care about crashing and bad performance at all.
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And you can OC i5-6400 and that Z170 board is best buy, freaking over 10$ when its well withing the budget is laughable.
I was thinking about it more and not sure I should upgrade my PC... I haven't really run into any games I can't at least run yet... although some on the lower end settings. My current system is below minimum specs for some of the newer games but it usually ends up running them fine. I'm thinking I should save the money for future consoles... I like being able to take just about any position I want when playing console vs having to sit upright to use a keyboard and mouse, and controllers just feel more comfortable to use. Plus with the computer parts I get I tend to go for mid-range parts which can't be pushed much past what consoles are capable of. It's also too expensive to keep upgrading consoles and PC.
I'm still thinking about it so I might upgrade the PC. IDK, it sucks playing FPS games on console, but I mostly just play WoW on PC, and sometimes FPS, and my system works fine for that. I think I will have to upgrade with the next gen consoles if I want to keep PC gaming but not sure I will... might just switch to console only gaming.
I was thinking about it more and not sure I should upgrade my PC... I haven't really run into any games I can't at least run yet... although some on the lower end settings. My current system is below minimum specs for some of the newer games but it usually ends up running them fine. I'm thinking I should save the money for future consoles... I like being able to take just about any position I want when playing console vs having to sit upright to use a keyboard and mouse, and controllers just feel more comfortable to use. Plus with the computer parts I get I tend to go for mid-range parts which can't be pushed much past what consoles are capable of. It's also too expensive to keep upgrading consoles and PC.
I'm still thinking about it so I might upgrade the PC. IDK, it sucks playing FPS games on console, but I mostly just play WoW on PC, and sometimes FPS, and my system works fine for that. I think I will have to upgrade with the next gen consoles if I want to keep PC gaming but not sure I will... might just switch to console only gaming.
I don't know why they make minimum requirements higher than they actually are for recent games. I think minimum should be playable at 30 fps on low settings. In doom I average 30+ fps on medium settings on campaign and the only minimum requirement my system meets is 8gb of ram. According to game debate my cpu and gpu are half as powerful as the minimum required cpu and gpu.
I don't know why they make minimum requirements higher than they actually are for recent games. I think minimum should be playable at 30 fps on low settings. In doom I average 30+ fps on medium settings on campaign and the only minimum requirement my system meets is 8gb of ram. According to game debate my cpu and gpu are half as powerful as the minimum required cpu and gpu.
If your still struggling to get 30fps after reducing the settings and resolution etc. Then yes, you need to upgrade, if you were getting 60 fps then it might be worth the trade off. If your PC doesn't match the minimum required CPU and GPU, that doesn't mean it won't run the game, it just means it won't run the game at a standard that most people find acceptable. O.o
I'm not struggling to get 30fps... It runs comfortably at 30fps. I've only encountered one room where it drops below 30 for a significant amount of time. if I set it to low I get 60+ fps at most times. Whether or not most people find 30 fps acceptable/playable is widely debatable. Maybe enthusiasts have fits over 60fps. But I highly doubt "most people" do.
What's the estimate price of the first vega cards going to be? I'm thinking I just might upgrade only my GPU sometime soon...no later than October. If the vega is going to be over 400, I might just get a 1070 now.
What's the estimate price of the first vega cards going to be? I'm thinking I just might upgrade only my GPU sometime soon...no later than October. If the vega is going to be over 400, I might just get a 1070 now.
Waters need to settle down since 2 new GPU lines were just released but AMD RX 480 looks like much better deal currently, by a long shot.
Yeah the rx 480 has nice performance for the price but the 1070 has almost double the framerates on all games on anandtech benchmarks, so it seems a little more futureproof. Plus near double the frames for double the price also seems like good price for performance. If I were to get the 1070 I would want it to last like 6+ years... but who knows if it would die before then.
Yeah the rx 480 has nice performance for the price but the 1070 has almost double the framerates on all games on anandtech benchmarks, so it seems a little more futureproof. Plus near double the frames for double the price also seems like good price for performance. If I were to get the 1070 I would want it to last like 6+ years... but who knows if it would die before then.
Not really double but...
Regardless, on one hand you say you might want some save money, prefer a mid-range rig, etc....and then you do not mind going for really expensive 1070FE?
Well the 480 is probably the safer bet since it's pretty doubtful the 1070 would live through until the end of the real next gen consoles (not scorpio and neo). The 480 would most likely play everything at high+ at least at 45+ frames until the next gen consoles arrive which is where game specs usually start to rise.
Comments
On the left side of the ring we have the Asrock b150 skylake overclocker (not the one that's an optimal price point buy that one is only out in europe and hasn't arrived to US still bummer h170 pro4/hyper or b150a-x1)
http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20B150%20Gaming%20K4Hyper/?cat=Specifications
On the right side of the ring we have the cheapest z170 on newegg that's decent :
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z170A-KRAIT-GAMING-3X.html#hero-specification
asrock - $114 msi - $130.5
So conclusions : not as big price difference as we'd hoped, msi one is competitive, the asrock answer to this to make the difference $25-$30 has not yet arrived.
Differences between the two :
Sound :
They have the same audio chip as the base with the B150 asrock having better dac, amplifier, better and more capacitors to enchance the same ALC1150 Realtek audio chip which is the best implemented for 99.9999% of all motherboard in skylake generation.
Lan :
Asrock has the killer e2400 while msi hasIntel® I219-V. Now u could say killer has had bloatware and intel's just works better (notice the past tense). They are exactly the same. If you for personal reasons do not like the killer bloatware, you can download the lan driver without it thus making both chips compete on equal ground. What's interesting to note is that msi puts the killer e2400 chip on pretty 50% of all of its motherboards that are more expensive than this msi motherboard. Conclusion msi thinks there's no notable difference.
USB :
Asrock doesn't have 3.1, MSI has 3.1+1 is type c. If you have use of this and/or know u will need it in the future u should the MSI. However with a little bit of thinking for 95% of the people this turns into wasted money for stuff that im not gonna use until at least my next build:
Storage :
Both support NVMe as boot, and m.2. asrock doesn't have u.2 support, you would have to get the $120 h170 model for that. Again a fringe case (just fluff on paper). But if you're already min-maxing here, will you really have usb 3.1 and NVMe and u.2 devices which cost a hefty premium ?. No you won't you payed more for the capability on the if-case u might or might need it in the future when you have loads more money that you now. Not very fiscally responsible for the present is it ?
Graphics + add-on cards :
ASrock has 1 PCI-e slot less of each kind than MSI. using 1 single GPU ?, not difference whatsover.
Power delievery :
ASrock has 10 phases, MSI has 8 phases. asrock has better components overall, except for reinforced pci-e slots, and better and higher quality phase delivery system.
Both motherboard have specific color scheme, which means if you're picky you would not be comparing this z170 to this b150 and vice versa.
And that's it.
Next time i'll give a comparison on how a b150-d3h microATX gigabyte motherboard @ $68 fares to a z170-d3h microATX gigabyte motherboard @ $113.
Thus not only skipping the troublesome pain in the neck for other motherboard companies (Asrock), and figuring out how Malaboga calculated this $113-$68 as $10 difference, ...
Yes, you can seriously overpay for a Z-board. But you can seriously overpay for any board, that really doesn't matter.
You have convinced me - I may look at particular B-series chipsets, if linked, and certain models may be up to snuff. But in general, I do consider them to be largely of a lower caliber than I would suggest putting in with an Intel CPU.
Kinda like there ~can~ be nice Toyotas, but you have to look out for exactly what you are buying. But if you jump up to the Lexus, it'll probably be fairly nice no matter which you pick.
You either have A. you are overclocking the 6400/6500 on a $15-$35 cheaper motherboard with better overclocking capabilities and this is unimportant.
or B. would you look at that it doesn't actually make that much of a difference for the stuff i'm using the machine for, for example gaming.
The fps difference compared to $ saved is hard to compare due to choice of games and other stuff a person would do, but a averages from reviewers off youtube and on youtube pretty much prove the difference is not that big (unless you're exclusively playing cpu intensive mmos) in which case there's a bigger difference, but still not enough to warrant the expense on a tight budget.
Numbers that make less difference than their mathematical disparity are how relevant again ?
IPC is less important than GHz or ? (of course we're ignoring the variability of turbo/boost, and you forgot to mention that 6500-6600k is actually only 3.6GHz-3.9GHz, no biggie just don't let it happen again)
Just for fun lets go for C, let me put myself in other people's shoes, ignore my default belief system and brain settings in favour of out the box comparative thinking, and say all that i wrote above in this post is bollocks, and drop you this little gem :
i5-6500 - $205
i5-6600 - $230
i5-6600k - $255(currently 10% off)
How many brain gymnastics does it take to justify spending the additional money over the 6500 without a significantly higher budget cap ?
Am i the only one between the 3 of us, and more people eventually when they read these posts, who sees a sneaky financial pattern here ?
we've got $15-$45 difference on mobo $25-$50 difference on cpu, then a over-the-top ~$20 CPU cooler difference, $15-$20 pointless disk drive, ~$30 PSU difference, etc ...
Am i the only one who seems to notice the insanely huge money waste going on here, that can be funneled for a 960 to a 970 gpu difference ???
And then suddenly people who were advised that their budget will never, ever never accommodate a 970 over 960 can by the miracle of fiscal responsibility and smart planning suddenly get it !, ...
P.S. @ Aethaeryn
Are you maybe possible, slightly just a little bit, regretting that u asked me for an explanation :P and secretly wishing all these walls of text could magically transform into a blog post with nice pictures, graphs, nifty comparison and/or a linus youtube video (or anyone elses who dabbles in hardware)
I know i am regretting a bit just tiny, whiny, slightly that i have 40% less hours to sleep now because i indeed did not have the time to write all of this
and it's still missing eu to us price comparison, another 8 motherboards preliminary comparison, and then at least 6 in-depth motherboard comparison with exactly vrm and all other mobo parts quality and quantity comparison taken from at least 2 dozen reviews, and hundreds of enthusiast forum posts, ... with 5 youtube 5 non-youtube 6500-6600-6600k non-overclock, overclock comparisons and advice from one the best germany's professional OC people (specifically about BCLK OC), etc, ...
Some random guy on some random mediocre forum in my native language mentioned this when they skylake b150/h170s first came out, and i was, what is this cheapass talking about, he's gonna ruin people's builds at this rate.
But i was curious, so i checked a bit, then some time passed, i checked a bit again, then some people presented some compelling evidence, and before you know it, i was literally speechless.
You had all these b150 motherboards which made h170 completely obsolete (100% a few months after launch, less now, someone noticed it was making no sense and convinced mobo makers to lower h170 prices and add more fluff :P)
And then you had b150 motherboards which gave <$200 z170 a run for their money. It was a whole new world (again someone noticed this and told the mobo makers to stop losing money and lowered the gap a bit xD)
At one point it was so bad that it was, you either get gigabyte z170-ud3 or u get a b150 motherboard. From a pure utilitarian and practical standpoint, this was the only motherboard u needed to put a 6600k/6700k and do 99% of the max OC. It was crazy.
But yeah, in your last paragraph you're completely right, you have to know what you're looking for, and what exactly you're buying, same like you can get any seasonic power supply, and call it a day, but with some other, oh boy, research, research, research
I mean look at this, it's the 2nd or 3rd cheapest b150 motherboard :http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128874
It's the first one that's not complete shit, and it has 4 ram slots (how ?), VRM heatsink power delivery cooling (wtf ?), its even better than the asrock one and the same one from the $50 more expensive z170-d3h.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128892
Look at this sweet motherboard, it was %30 of a while ago, that was the best buy from -$75 to +$75 from its price, just look how much they had to drop the z170s, the krait was like $220 or something a couple of months after it came out now its $150.
Quizzical you got the krait didn't you ? do you remember how much you payed for it and when roughly did u get it ?
On the motherboard, I'm not arguing that he should get a Z170. I'm arguing against that and a B150 for the same reason: it's better to keep the motherboard he has unless he gets a larger budget.
On the motherboard, I got a Core i7-4790K because I gave up on waiting for Sky Lake. So I have an MSI Z97 Gaming 7 or something like that. The only way to get the Fury X on New Egg at the time was as part of a combo deal, so I got the motherboard that was part of the combo deal.
Worse, scaling to multiple sockets isn't like scaling to multiple cores. For server loads built for it, it's fine. But for consumer programs not built to use multiple sockets intelligently, a two-socket system can sometimes have its performance improved by removing one of the CPUs to make it a one-socket system.
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And you can OC i5-6400 and that Z170 board is best buy, freaking over 10$ when its well withing the budget is laughable.
I'm still thinking about it so I might upgrade the PC. IDK, it sucks playing FPS games on console, but I mostly just play WoW on PC, and sometimes FPS, and my system works fine for that. I think I will have to upgrade with the next gen consoles if I want to keep PC gaming but not sure I will... might just switch to console only gaming.
Anyways, thanks to everyone who posted.
In that regard ;-)
If your PC doesn't match the minimum required CPU and GPU, that doesn't mean it won't run the game, it just means it won't run the game at a standard that most people find acceptable. O.o
Regardless, on one hand you say you might want some save money, prefer a mid-range rig, etc....and then you do not mind going for really expensive 1070FE?
Seems weird...
I also said near double which according to this link they are.
Like I said, for someone who:
going for latest and fastest card one can buy is...weird.