# Anyone recommend a motherboard for a PC Salve Build CPU will be i7 6700



## leggylangdon (Oct 24, 2016)

About to embark on my first PC build!

Anyone got any pointers for me??

Cheers

Leggy


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## Prockamanisc (Oct 24, 2016)

It depends on what your requirements are- how many USB, if you need Thunderbolt, etc. Have you thought that through? Most boards are just fine, the specs should be the real deciding factor.


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## leggylangdon (Oct 24, 2016)

Prockamanisc said:


> It depends on what your requirements are- how many USB, if you need Thunderbolt, etc. Have you thought that through? Most boards are just fine, the specs should be the real deciding factor.



Don't need much usb and I don't need thunderbolt...this will be a slave machine only with internal SSDs for samples and system drive on Samsung M2 Pci. Just want to make sure it's stable...but good to know that most boards are fine...


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## Prockamanisc (Oct 24, 2016)

leggylangdon said:


> slave machine only with internal SSDs


Awesome, then just make sure it has a bunch of SATA drives. My slave has 9 drives connected, including 1x M.2 drive for the OS. I keep my samples on 500GB drives because I was told it boots faster (I can't tell, but it's lightning fast so I don't find the need to question it much). 

I personally have an ASRock Extreme4, it's an X99 so I can use DDR4 RAM. I'd do X99, because then you can get a board that will support 128GB RAM. When you buy sticks of RAM, buy them in 16GB sticks, that way you can just upgrade as you need.


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## leggylangdon (Oct 24, 2016)

Prockamanisc said:


> Awesome, then just make sure it has a bunch of SATA drives. My slave has 9 drives connected, including 1x M.2 drive for the OS. I keep my samples on 500GB drives because I was told it boots faster (I can't tell, but it's lightning fast so I don't find the need to question it much).
> 
> I personally have an ASRock Extreme4, it's an X99 so I can use DDR4 RAM. I'd do X99, because then you can get a board that will support 128GB RAM. When you buy sticks of RAM, buy them in 16GB sticks, that way you can just upgrade as you need.



Sweet! Yeah I was looking at an X99....thanks so much for your thoughts on this!


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## ZeroZero (Oct 25, 2016)

I have an X99a and it performs well, the earlier boards did not have USB3.1 which is much faster than USB3. I did not know that you could update the firmware and then the board takes 128gig RAM. This is good news as the stock default is 64gig. Updating firmware on Asus mobos has always been difficult here, their app does not perform well and the manual method is also tricky. I have not succeeded here, even following Asus instructions immaculately. I have tried again today and their site is down. Chatting to tech they told me that I needed to reistall my operating system! Everything else works!!!


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## EvilDragon (Oct 25, 2016)

You didn't have to open one thread for each CPU, you know?


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## leggylangdon (Oct 25, 2016)

EvilDragon said:


> You didn't have to open one thread for each CPU, you know?



Yeah, I know....sorry about that...I posted on my phone and didn't realize I was posting each version of the post before I had finalized it.


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## Elephant (Oct 26, 2016)

Take a look at rgames posts on your question - lots of info there, Richard was achieving about $1k for a 6700K slave IIRC. Much depends on how quickly you need to get the build done - looks like the forthcoming Z270 chipset mobo's and Kaby Lake equivalent of the 6700K (7700K) could be even better, and if you are using VEP, and have both master and slave running thunderbolt, you might be able to configure the network across the t'bolt connection, allowing you to reduce the latency further than just using Gb ethernet. Depends what you have as a master. If you need a slave now, and only want 64GB, then the 6700K would fit the bill. If you want 128GB now, then X99 and the older 5820K is working well according to folks here. If it is your first build you could do a lot worse than copy someone else's build. 
Good luck !


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## khollister (Oct 26, 2016)

If you are set on a 6700k, I would stick with a Z170 MB & 64GB of RAM. I know Richard is advocating i5 slaves with lots of RAM and disk I/O, but my personal experience is that CPU matters and I'm doing just fine with 64GB with some real memory hogs. A Z170 MB with NVME sockets would be my choice for a 4 core build. If you were going to spend the big money on a Broadwell-E 6,8 or 10 core CPU, then X99 and more RAM would be more appropriate IMHO.

Several of us have 39xx/49xx/59xx based slaves with 64GB and aren't feeling the need to go bigger right now. As SSD I/O improves and Kontakt and PLAY continue to update their SW to rebalance the streaming vs RAM footprint, I'm not sure I will need 128GB even in the next few years. 

Skylake-E should be "the bomb" as far as having it all, but that is well into next year (hence the Mac Pro update dilemma). The problem is the E and XEON CPU's and chipsets have been lagging the quad desktop parts by at least 6 months if not longer recently. There is also the clock speed differences. Most of us went 6 core "E" a couple years ago because the i7 desktop Ivy and Haswell CPU's couldn't address 64GB - we had no choice by the X79 platform for 64GB.


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## ZeroZero (Oct 27, 2016)

I want to say that I have not solved my problem with the Asus board (X99a). Although the board seems good, the software does not work for updating the bios, nor does the manual root. This is the second mobo from them that has this issue, therefore I would not recommend Asus boards, unless you dont want to update the bios and access more memory. Calling tech takes ten minutes to get you to a robot that tells you to email, emailing, is a real struggle, demanding serial numbers, type for memory, gpu and more, then gets no response from Asus.


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## khollister (Oct 27, 2016)

ZeroZero said:


> I want to say that I have not solved my problem with the Asus board (X99a). Although the board seems good, the software does not work for updating the bios, nor does the manual root. This is the second mobo from them that has this issue, therefore I would not recommend Asus boards, unless you dont want to update the bios and access more memory. Calling tech takes ten minutes to get you to a robot that tells you to email, emailing, is a real struggle, demanding serial numbers, type for memory, gpu and more, then gets no response from Asus.



A) Always update the BIOS from the utility in the BIOS - don't try the Windows installer, don't try the "push the button on the motherboard" thing.
B) If I recall, the flash drive has to be formatted in FAT32


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## leggylangdon (Oct 27, 2016)

Thank you all for your help on this one, feeling like I may just pull this off now! 

Leggy


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