Why z170 over x99 or z97?

[ninjacore]

for some purposes the new Skylakes under Windows 10 can have huge performance jumps over previous gen chips.

Hmm. Didn't know this. I'll have to find more. Any justification I can find to upgrade, is good justification

 

[Mordachai]

I'll link stuff here if I can find it again. I was just browsing various reviews for the skylake and - I want to say "a couple of them" had some tests which shows a significant jump in performance for some application tests but only when running Win10. I assume it's related to changes in the multithreading scheduling support in the OS + chip, or something similar, but mostly I was in a "wow, check that out" mode rather than really taking notes on it. The article(s) didn't have any idea why either - just that they were told to expect that, and there it was.