Get the i5 from Amazon. I've noticed if one doesn't have one in stock then the other will.
Top tech tip from PP Mguire, never pay attention to Newegg reviews. You have to understand a simple concept. How many people are more obligated to bitch about their bad experience over their good experience? Now, how many of those people should have been a simple email straight to the manu? Let's take one good example out of the bunch (the FP Header issues could be a simple send straight back to Newegg for instant replacement).
Cons: Shipped with old bios. [on the extreme6, this rendered it useless when paired with the new skylake cpu]
Will not boot with XMP Profiles enabled
Fan control, Tuning utility and UEFI settings have all been changed and practically rendered useless.
The boards X.M.P. Profile will not support memory over 2133. [or the stock UEFI setting] Changing to the XMP profile changes more than just the memory timings and clock, apparently it messes with the bclock or other settings on the board. I cannot boot without freezing using G.Skill Trident Series DDR4 3000. [memory tested fine in memtest at rated speeds, simply will not boot all the way to windows without freezing]
First of all, ALL bios on Z170 boards support Skylake. Z170 is the only chipset for SKylake currently. There are NO other chips for that chipset, therefore it should have worked. Which we look at problem 2. XMP profiles aren't always going to work. DDR4 is new, meaning you might not always get what you want. "won't boot past 2133" That's because 2133 is DDR4 JDEC standard speed. What the issue here is, the board doesn't like the XMP profile from the RAM so needs to be manually tweaked. I have this very issue on my 600 dollar Asus WS board. It happens. Also, Skylake uses a clock strap like Haswell-E to achieve high DDR4 speeds. If the idiot did the slightest bit of research he would have known that and would have let the XMP do it's job. SO what I'm gathering is, the ignorant user set XMP setting, reduced bclk to 100, and boom won't boot.
-The (Not fixed) manual adjustment of Vcore can not be set as the mainboards from other manufacturers, the "offset mode" does not show as increases or decreases the value of the VCore.
-A-tuning software is very basic.
This guy clearly has no understanding of how offset works LOL.
Make sense? Sure hope so, cause I hate ranting about stupid pointless reviews.
Next up, ASRock has been under a different parent company since 2009 and has been making solid boards and a name for themselves since 2011. My first ASRock board was an AMD board that worked brilliantly, and my next was an ASRock X79 Extreme6. I highly recommend them, and IMO they give you more bang for your buck over Asus boards. This combined with the many many builds I've done for other people using ASRock boards. You're in pretty safe hands BUT if you want to go Asus, a lot of their boards are getting bad reviews too from idiots NOT being capable of working a new advanced system with NEW RAM.
ASUS Z170-A LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com
ASUS Z170 PRO GAMING LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com
If you require higher reviews, this Gigabyte is cheap and is decent.
GIGABYTE GA-Z170XP-SLI (rev. 1.0) LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com
For the SSD, my thoughts are I recommend an 850 EVO in almost any build
The Pro IMO is not worth it unless getting the 950Pro for obvious reasons.