I'm finally going to do it and upgrade from core 2 quad Intel 775 system in my sig. Looking for recommendations for under a £100. Single gfx card Unlikely to over clock. Full ATX. Intel (thinking 1150 and trying to decide between i5 4690 or 4460) USB 3.0 / 3.1 preferred for future proofing (see how old last rig is) 5.1 Sound M.2 - Still looking into this for SSD but not sure it makes a difference to Sata? Current thoughts are ASUS Z97-P MSI Gaming 3 Any others? I have about £300 - £350 to spend and need the holy trinity (Mobo, Ram and Processor)
IMO you won't beat the Z97-P for spec at it's price. There aren't any USB3.1 mainboards as of yet but I heard they were to be released in Q2. Not sure how true that is but I don't think it's a massive feature TBH. M.2 is nice but currently the M.2 SSD's are a lot more expensive than their SATA brethren. I'd buy a SATA SSD now and get an M.2 drive in the future when it can better take advantage of the extra bandwidth. You can get an i5 4690k, Asus Z97-P and 8GB of DDR3 for £325 which is in the middle of your budget.
Any reason to go for full ATX when you're only going to use one GPU? You could make an ITX system which is of course much smaller and still gives you everything you want. Also, why aren't you likely to overclock? It's free performance To be had. It is also incredibly easy nowadays. When are you looking to upgrade? Intel should be letting their Broadwell and Skylake parts into the wild fairly soon.
MSI have some boards with USB 3.1 but not the gaming 3 so I would miss out there I was going ATX because of my case which I'm keeping a Carbide Air 540 would be very empty with itx in. As for over clocking I might do some but I worked out a long time ago that if you spend a fortune on air / watercooling you can increase the performance / reduce the life of the kit or introduce instability or just spend a bit more in the first place for hardware designed to run that fast with the free stock cooler. Looking to upgrade this week as I'm off for Easter hoping to order today for tomorrow.
