I has been more than fives since I built the 2500k PC for FSX/P3D and I'm a bit out of touch with today's hardware market.

 

I'm getting prepared to build a completely new system with coming 7700K for flight sim only. Most hardware parts are easy to pick. The problem is the motherboard: there are so many Z170 motherboards to choose from. Every brand like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI all has zillions of Z170 variants, unbelievable.  

 

Right now I'm looking at GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z170X-Gaming 7 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128835). 

 

Any recommendations based on your experiences will be very much appreciated. 

I am no expert at building PCs, Just finished my first build two months ago,

 

If your going to go for a 7700k wait a month for the first Z270 boards to go on sale, is what i would recommend  

If this article is true I would give Kabylake a miss unless its cheap.

 

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/12/09/intel_kaby_lake_core_i77700k_ipc_review/#.WFLjRmfAPtQ

I'm leaning toward Kabylake b/c it's supposed to be easier to overclock it to 5GHz. My current 2500k is overclocked to 4.92GHz and that's the major reason I haven't thought about upgrading the system for five years, only kept upgrading GPU every couple years. My impression is that P3D etc is severly CPU-bound, so the higher the CPU clock speed, the better. 

 

I'll see if I can wait for the Z270. Right now XP11 looks so spectacular it really gives me a hard time to wait longer... 

If this article is true I would give Kabylake a miss unless its cheap.

 

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/12/09/intel_kaby_lake_core_i77700k_ipc_review/#.WFLjRmfAPtQ

 

 

 

 

Yep, that's what we pretty much new... IPC for Kaby lake is barely any different to Skylake. Some reviews have it a few percent higher.

 

Personally, I wouldn't say "don't buy Kaby Lake" though. If the OP can afford it [as Skylake prices may drop] and doesn't mind waiting, Kaby lake will offer other features that might be useful other than performance. For example Optane.

 

Overclocking is a mystery at the moment, we can't say how well it will overclock. It turbos to 4.5, so you would think a mere 500MHz would be easy, but we can't be sure. Will have to wait and see.

 

In addition, once the Z270 boards are here and they've had a few bios updates, we may find it overclocks very nicely indeed.