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Skylake i7-6700K with Gigabyte GA-Z170MX - Unity3D dev machine

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Mar 14, 2016
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Motherboard
GA-Z170N-Gaming 5
CPU
Intel Core i7-6700K
Graphics
Asus GTX 1070 Turbo
I've been lurking and researching for awhile now, and I'm finally ready to put myself (and my wallet) to the test with this build. I hope you fine folks can give me some feedback about my buying list - please let me know if you see any incompatibilities or potential issues - and hopefully I can follow up this post with a [Success] repost so others can benefit from my build!


This build is intended to be the centerpiece of my home office; I’ll be doing dev work in Unity3D on El Capitan, and hopefully Windows 10 in a dual boot so I can try Visual Studios, plus doing my normal day-to-day computing stuff on El Capitan and playing games that don’t usually push the graphics envelope (Dwarf Fortress, League of Legends, lots of indie steam games), also on El Capitan. I’ll have dual monitors plugged in for the dev work, and hardwired ethernet (so no need for a wifi adapter).


CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor


I haven’t built a desktop since I switched to OS X back around ~2002, so I’m going for the higher end with a Skylake CPU to maximize my futureproofing. My dev work is sometimes CPU-intensive, and I play a couple of games like Dwarf Fortress that put more strain on the CPU than GPU, so I feel like its worth the price tag.


I'm also getting an aftermarket CPU cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO) and some Arctic Silver 5 High-Density Thermal Paste.


Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5 Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard


Besides requiring compatibility with the CPU, I was looking for three important features. First, I wanted a USB 3.1 slot so I could be ready to upgrade the external drive I take with me. Second, I wanted 4x slots for RAM so I could start with 16GB and leave myself room to grow to 32GB in the future. Third, I was hoping to get something smaller than ATX so I didn’t have to worry about a behemoth case. This mobo looks to fit the bill, and reviews say it also has solid onboard audio, which is nice since I’ve been eyeballing an external DAC but probably won’t get one for another year or so.


Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory


I’m only using 2 of the 4 slots in the motherboard, but this gives me room to upgrade in the future.


GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card


I don’t really play that many games with cutting edge graphics, but I do work in 3D and enjoy a AAA game from time to time, so I went with a high-mid tier graphics card.


SSD: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive


This is what was recommended in this site's buyer’s guide, so made sense to me as the main storage for the OS and my applications.

HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive


Also recommended in this site’s buyer guide; the storage for my data/files (which are mostly in the cloud anyway).


Power: Corsair CSM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply


Also recommended in this site’s buyer guide. I'm just assuming 550W is enough power because I forgot how to account for these sorts of things in the ~15 years since I built a PC :)
 
Hi there,
I've got a somewhat similar build, here's my 2 cents.

K processor: are you going to overclock it? Otherwise just get the non-K version and put that money elsewhere. I bought a K CPU in the build before my current one, never OC'D it and it still died. This time I went non K and water cooled, which from what I can tell gives me much lower temps and also takes up less room in my MATX case.

The board (and ram): I like it, but like the Millennium Falcon (excuse the comparison) it has its quirks. The USB 3.1 port for instance, today I had to plug my USB2 camera/mic in for a FaceTime call and the whole thing rebooted... Just like that. First time it's happened but a lesson learned to just leave it plugged in. The 4 ram slots, they're a bit of a gamble if you want to run your ram at XMP profile1 – the board is frustratingly picky which slots you can use for dual (and I'm assuming quad) channel, the manual says to do one thing, intuition says another, reality is different again. Annoying to say the least, I couldn't get it to run XMP in the same slots as the guys at GB until I'd run it in the other two, then I switched them, which worked for a few boots, then the 5 beeps at post issue came back. I'm hoping a UEFI/bios update fixes it though.

The cooler: that is similar to the one in my last build, it should be fine. I had an eBay voucher that was about to expire so I got a nice AIO water cooler with 140mm fans which seems to take up less real estate in my small case that an air cooled option.

GPU: there's been stacks of talk about the Pascal Nvidia cards coming out soon, I'd consider going cheap now and then upgrading when they drop to take advantage of a significant leap in performance.

Storage: I went M2 SSD, and because of the nvme kext (I believe, but could be wrong), my computer reboots on shutdown. I have to flick the power button off to stop it. Not ideal, so a regular SSD would be good until that is fixed. 7200's for storage make sense unless you can get a 480gb SSD, how much stuff are you storing?

Windows drive: I had this working but 10.11.4 stuffed my main disk and the windows drive got dumped in the clean up process. Definitely possible though. Once you have Win installed you can use Easy UEFI to remove the extra boot entries that Clover is going to create.

PSU: my corsair was good, but the EVGA one I have now is exceptional. The best PSU I've seen/used.pretty sure mines either 550 or 650w.

Have you decided on a case yet?

Excuse the potential typos, I'm writing this on my phone
 
Did you build this config ? If you did I would be interested in your experience. I was planning to do the same.
Thanks
 
Hi im having trouble with this same build, ive tried a few build instructions and at least got to the desktop with El Capitan, but I could never get the NVIDIA 970 to be recognised, has any one got a successful build with these components? EFI?
 
That's unfortunate to hear, as I have just ordered exactly the same motherboard and graphics card (gtx 970).

I thought this was the most easy to install, most reliable build?
 
That's unfortunate to hear, as I have just ordered exactly the same motherboard and graphics card (gtx 970).

I thought this was the most easy to install, most reliable build?


Oh Im sure it was my bad from the start, I didn't think to follow someone else's build from the start, Im confident it will work. Im not a PC man, so Im like a deer caught in the headlights.

I did have it booting OSX in 5 minutes, restore from my timemachine, but just no dice on the GTX970, trying again with a fresh download of 10.11.5
 
That's unfortunate to hear, as I have just ordered exactly the same motherboard and graphics card (gtx 970).

I thought this was the most easy to install, most reliable build?


Did you have any luck? I still cant get my card recognised
 
Did you have any luck? I still cant get my card recognised

It worked for about 2 weeks flawlessly then all of a sudden I can't boot the computer anymore. Don't think it has to do with the graphics card though.

But yeah it worked. Just install the Nvidia drivers and boot it with a command. It was nrv_something=1.
 
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