Need advice to select between motherboards

memory_leak wrote: Hello all, I am going to build a new system and I am not really sure which motherboard I will choose. The choice is currently between z170 OC Formula and z170 Extreme7+. My demand for mobo is to support at least two m.2 slots (have 2x950 Pros) for raid 0 boot, and at least 4 sata hdds left beside 2xm.2. I will overclock, but nothing dramatic, will go for aircooler, and I will run just one gtx1080. I am not in a rush to buy and I am open for other mobos than those two as long as they support the storage I need and can do decent overclock, say around 4.5Ghz. Formula seems more stable and durable for overclock than extreme7+, but extreme is a tad bit cheeper.

I have the Z170 Extreme7+ board, and I know a forum member that owns one too. Skylake processors are easy to OC, the friend I mentioned had his i7-6700K running at 5.1GHz on this board, with water cooling. I have my i5-6600K at 4.5GHz at 1.21V, with a Noctua NH-D14. Skylake processors run cool compared to Haswell.

If you are not an over clocking enthusiast, meaning testing the limits of multiple processors, and or over clocking memory as high as possible, the Z170 OC Formula is unnecessary. You pay for features you never use, and you must understand those features or your PC won't work as you expect it to. Just a learning curve, and a bit not plug and play. Storage drive IO capabilities are identical on both of these boards.

The number of drives you require are supported by these boards, but I want to be sure you understand the differences that the Z170 chipset has compared to earlier Intel chipsets. These differences will be the same with all Skylake mother boards made by any manufacture.

With the Intel 100 series chipsets (such as Z170), the resources for the M.2 ports are provided by the Z170 chipset itself. All previous Intel platforms used the PCIe 3.0 lanes provided by the CPU for the M.2 ports. That reduced the number of PCIe 3.0 lanes available to video cards. Skylake boards give all the CPU's PCIe 3.0 lanes to the video cards, not shared with anything else.

The compromise with Skylake is the M.2 ports share resources with the Intel SATA III ports. One M.2 port shares resources with two Intel SATA III ports. You can use one or the other, but not both simultaneously.

So two 950 Pro's leaves you with two Intel SATA III ports. There are four SATA ports provided by two ASMedia SATA chipsets, but their performance is inferior to the Intel SATA ports.

Some important FYI about 950 Pros in RAID 0 (or any NVMe SSDs.) If you were a RAID user in the past, and used SATA SSDs in RAID 0, things are not the same with NVMe SSDs in RAID arrays as they are with SATA SSDs.

Performance scaling of NVMe SSDs is not like that of SATA SSDs. You won't get twice the sequential read speed, or write speed, with two 950 Pros. You'll reach about 3,200 MB/s for large file sequential read speeds with two 950 Pros.

More important, RAID arrays of NVMe SSDs are what I call "fragile". Given a RAID array of 950 Pros, OS or data drives, clear the UEFI/BIOS or perform a UEFI update. Upon the first startup of the PC after either of those things, going directly into the UEFI, you'll find the RAID array has failed. Confirmed by myself and other 950 Pro RAID users. If a RAID 0 array, no chance of a rebuild. This does not happen with SATA SSDs in RAID 0.

We are not certain of the cause. Probably related to the Intel IRST RAID software that has somehow combined SATA and NVMe support together. Quite an accomplishment, but at this point has some drawbacks.

Frankly, if you require that many HDDs, I would forget the RAID 0 array of 950 Pros, it is not faster in actual use than a single 950 Pro. I'm using one 950 Pro as the OS drive, which boots faster than the RAID 0 array. If you've never used RAID before, NVMe SSDs are NOT the way to learn about it.

In addition to Parsec's very thorough reply the only reason to go for the Formula OC over the Extreme 7+ other than overclocking is RAM performance. The OC Formula is the only board (to date) that supports the new >4000mhz ultra high performance DDR4 RAM kits from GSkill natively. The key element of the OC Formula series of boards is overclock tunining facilities, far beyond other more standard boards. The VRMs and power design are exceedingly high quality and efficient (making OC Formula boards fairly popular in some home server applications) and allow much more fine tuning of power delivery not to mention higher than normal voltage limits. This however is practically useless without adopting LN2, Phase Change or at the very least custom loop water cooling. These bad boys were designed from the ground up to set overclocking records on both CPU and memory. 

Edited by Xaltar - 21 May 2016 at 10:46pm

I agree with almost everything you said, and of course had no idea what your experience level building PCs is.

Your original question about the two boards in my mind implied you wanted to know which board would meet your needs better, and I simply gave you my opinion.

Given the new information about recording audio, you might benefit from the increased sequential read and write performance provided by a RAID 0 volume of 950 Pros. The difference will be a few seconds, as you know.

My main points about the differences between RAID 0 arrays of NVMe and SATA SSDs remains. Don't be surprised if the performance scaling of 950 Pros in RAID 0 is not what we get from SATA SSDs.

The points Xaltar made about the X99 platform are something you should consider. Personally, I don't use the ASMedia SATA interface due to its technical limitations.