Help me decide what to upgrade to

My mobo went poof, so I need quickly to decide what to burn money on. I found an 6600k that's cheaper than an 4690k from the usual store I buy stuff, so I'm going with it.

Here's a list of motherboards that are within my budget:

MSI TOMAHAWK AC
MSI Gaming M7
MSI Gaming M5
MSI Gaming Pro Carbon
Asus Pro Gaming

The ASUS Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1 is only slightly above my budget, if there's a REALLY good reason I should get it then enlighten me. I heard it has issues with USB mouse movement making noises.
Then there's the MSI XPower Gaming Titanium that's REALLY over my budget, but the features are... nice? Any reason other than I'll possibly regret not buying it to convince me to actually buy it?

NO Gigabyte because I've had my share of headaches with their crap.

Then there's the 16GB of RAM which I haven't decided yet. 2400Mhz CL14 or 2800~3200MHz CL15~16? All this along with a Samsung 850 EVO 250GB.

This build will be used mainly for watching anime, playing Star Trek Online, possibly some city simulator, casual video editing and maybe some Monte Carlo and Fortran simulations for my particle physics master degree. I don't plan to overclock for now, but I like stability and QUALITY voltages.

Any of the listed boards will suit you well.

I don't like either MSI nor Asus, matter of personal experience, but they are all good.

from all the reading I have done it looks like you just have to find one that has the features, connecters you need and fits your case.

I would go with Asus Pro Gaming it is better than the worse of the two evils.

ASUS Pro Gaming is like below ROG series and I didn't like Z170 ROG boards so if I had to choose now then I would try something from MSI.
If all boards from the list have all the features you need then I guess it won't make a difference which one you take. All will overclock about the same on air/water and all will support memory up to ~3600.

If all boards from the list have all the features you need then I guess it won't make a difference which one you take. All will overclock about the same on air/water and all will support memory up to ~3600.

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+1

Then there's the 16GB of RAM which I haven't decided yet. 2400Mhz CL14 or 2800~3200MHz CL15~16?

Click to expand...

2800-3000 CL14/15. I don't like going lower than that because its DDR3 speeds with DDR4 latencies.

Welp, this is what I'm going with:

Asus Pro Gaming, found it for $500 (US$142) less than MSI M7, yep brazillian taxes and currency exchange rates double the final price
G.Skill Ripjaws 4 - F4-3000C15D-16GRK
i5 6600k
Samsung 850 EVO 250GB
CoolerMaster Hyper 212X
some bluray drive that I can't find anywhere and possibly an external hard drive

Hopefuly I won't regret this

edit: on a second thought, reviews at newegg are scary. I might just reconsider.

I think that you'll be happy with your choice. The guys gave you some solid advise so I think this system will do well for a long time.

Reviews at newegg are scary on what?

newegg reviews are garbage and only really good for DOA type stuff at best.

EarthDog said:

Reviews at newegg are scary on what?

newegg reviews are garbage and only really good for DOA type stuff at best.

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Maybe. Then I found another store with even lower prices and a Maximus VIII Ranger for $100 less than the Pro Gaming, so win-win.

Not maybe...

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Not maybe...its known half of newegg reviews are a joke. Even the 'professional' new reviews are just done by random people/novices and are half junk/are not tested properly.

Glad you found some good prices! Enjoy!

One thing Newegg and other stores have going for it is Statistics, I don't know of another review site that has so many reviews on single products like Newegg you can even update your reviews now.

Come to think of it most people who build PCs are novices and random people, how many people get paid to slap there PC together.

Statistics I believe is what you meant there.

I didn't mean professional as in 'gets paid' to do it screwy. I just meant knows what they are doing. Has a firm grasp of concepts and troubleshooting methods to determine what the REAL problem is. We have a thread poking fun at some of the newegg reviews for a reason...

I think 99% of the people that assemble PCs don't know how to troubleshoot problems because it's all new products and it should just work stock. I don't see that many people come here asking how to assemble a new PC. I don't think there are that many funny review at Newegg people are desperate not to have disassembly and send products back. I read through the reviews all the time and they have the same help from the manufactures as we give here. When you read people are having the same problem on the same part I would avoid that. I have been reading about many complaints with onboard Creative Sound Core 3D chip problem that only happens after hours of game play or using the sound for long periods, you don't get that from a review site.

Ohai. Finished setting everything up yesterday, it's pretty amazing I must say. If only W10 wasn't terribad as far as looks go, although I'm getting used to it. I kinda regret not spending a bit more for a 500GB SSD instead as I'll only have less than 60gigs of free space in each partition after dual-booting with Ubuntu. Other than that I realized 1TB hard drives are not enough anymore for those bluray rips.