007vsMagua

RainStryke
Asus is a pretty solid choice, have not had an issue with any of their products since I switched to Intel.
 
EVGA has not really put anything out on the motherboard market that is of interest to me... The last board I had from them was a X58 (E758) board and it blew away any competitors board I had dealt with previously. After a while the support from EVGA was lacking. Updating the BIOS was always a pain, you had to use 3rd party software to make it possible to update by USB. The software (EVGA E-LEET) was straight up abandoned and EVGA told users to delete it due to it's complications.
 
I waited a while for user reviews on the X79, thinking I'd give EVGA one more try... Decided against it when customers were reporting the BIOS chip being corrupted or DOA. Took me about 10 years to give MSI another try and I'm glad I did, cause I have not had a single issue with any of their products so far.

I'm not a hardcore upgrader and my next build will be my third build...coming this summer. Money has always been an issue so I'm always looking for a balance of cost and performance.
 
In my first build I used the MSI P6N SLI Platinum with an Intel Q6600. I did run into some problems when I tried to oc the cpu, but if left alone it's still working fine.
 
The EVGA P55 has been a great board and has allowed me to run my i5-750 at 3.8Ghz and stable in testing. I've kept it at 3.2Ghz to allow for Turbo and the board is still going strong. I do remember having to deal with BIOS updates and fortunately the last one works for me.
 
Two years ago I picked up the MSI GTX 780Ti at Newegg for $330.00. That price may have been a mistake as the sale price was not listed the next day. The card has worked perfect for my needs. I really like how MSI presents itself. They seem to offer high end components like capacitors etc. in their designs. I'm not sure what customer support is like at MSI as I've never had to use them.

Pretty good deal on that GTX 780Ti. The first generation B1 stepping Q6600's overclocked like crap, some were lucky to see 2.8GHz. The G0 stepping Q6600 was far more efficient, most could get to 3.6GHz. I ran a Q6700 back then and it wouldn't do much past 3.6GHz on my EVGA 780i. Upgraded to a Gigabyte X48 board and it hit 3.9GHz. To be fair, it was the fact that Intel had the best chipset for the motherboards, Nvidia was pretty terrible back then... It made overclocking a lot harder, keeping up with the blue screen codes when you crash, and making BIOS adjustments consistently. I did have one issue with that Gigabyte X48 board... It kept reading my VRM's at 200C, had to send it in for a new sensor.

Dukman
I was looking at Z170/270 boards yesterday.   
 
It's interesting that in many cases, price difference between the two are pretty close.  I was looking at MSI and the M5 Gaming board.  The M5 Z170 is going for 169.99, the Z270 for 189.00.  A bit more spread on the Z270 179.00 vs. 244.00.  Didn't look or compare ASUS, but EVGA had the biggest difference.  100.00 between the ClassifiedK Z170 and the Z270 .
 
Even closer with the i7 CPU's. 7700k was only 10.00 more than the 6700k.
 
I haven't done my research yet to find out what changed or improved between the two, I'll look into that further today if I have some downtime.  Which, sadly I suspect I will definitely have. 
 

Performance differences between your i7 4790K and a i7 6 or 7 series is pretty much nothing but clock speed. The boost is higher on the i7 7700K... All you have to do is push your CPU a little faster, you will have the same performance. I've messed around with mine with the MSI automated software and it managed to get me to 4.9GHz stable. If I had a Z97 board, I would get a i7 5775C. If Microcenter carried them, I would have probably bought one by now.

Dukman
I was looking at Z170/270 boards yesterday.   
 
It's interesting that in many cases, price difference between the two are pretty close.  I was looking at MSI and the M5 Gaming board.  The M5 Z170 is going for 169.99, the Z270 for 189.00.  A bit more spread on the Z270 179.00 vs. 244.00.  Didn't look or compare ASUS, but EVGA had the biggest difference.  100.00 between the ClassifiedK Z170 and the Z270 .
 
Even closer with the i7 CPU's. 7700k was only 10.00 more than the 6700k.
 
I haven't done my research yet to find out what changed or improved between the two, I'll look into that further today if I have some downtime.  Which, sadly I suspect I will definitely have. 
 

Z270 gives you a few more PCI-E lanes compared to Z170. The only windows version officially supported for Intel Kabylake CPU is windows 10, also if you ever want to stream 4k movies/shows from streaming sites like Netflix, you will need Intel Kabylake CPU. 
 
I would say the extra $20-30 is worth it to go Z270 over Z170. 
 
 

007vsMagua

MSim

Dukman
I was looking at Z170/270 boards yesterday.   
 
It's interesting that in many cases, price difference between the two are pretty close.  I was looking at MSI and the M5 Gaming board.  The M5 Z170 is going for 169.99, the Z270 for 189.00.  A bit more spread on the Z270 179.00 vs. 244.00.  Didn't look or compare ASUS, but EVGA had the biggest difference.  100.00 between the ClassifiedK Z170 and the Z270 .
 
Even closer with the i7 CPU's. 7700k was only 10.00 more than the 6700k.
 
I haven't done my research yet to find out what changed or improved between the two, I'll look into that further today if I have some downtime.  Which, sadly I suspect I will definitely have. 
 

Z270 gives you a few more PCI-E lanes compared to Z170. The only windows version officially supported for Intel Kabylake CPU is windows 10, also if you ever want to stream 4k movies/shows from streaming sites like Netflix, you will need Intel Kabylake CPU. 
 
I would say the extra $20-30 is worth it to go Z270 over Z170. 
 
 

^+1

On of the reasons i decided to go with the z270 in stepup and the i7-7700k was the extra pcie and 4k. The u.2 while nice doesnt really provide much more right now ( im sure the extra speed will be noticed for certain users in the server world ) and optane is who knows right now. The other reason i went to the z270 classy was it just looks good, the rgb stuff really doesnt interest me at all. I do wish evga would stepup their game on the software side, the other big three ( asus, gigabyte and msi ) all have great boards and utilities.

Asus Z270 Maximus IX Code Baby!!

Wow, Newegg currently giving away a Phantecs P400 case with the ASUS Z270 Tuf Mark 1.

Having put together a build in that case, I would rather just get a 70.00 discount on the motherboard.
 
It's a good looking Mobo.   But it's made by them.  :