If you bought a "refreshed" X99 board today that has similar features to the Z170 boards you can buy now, how are you being negatively impacted? I ask because what you've said actually mirrors what I've been thinking about on the topic, as well.
Forgive my long post, but let me shed some light on my (somewhat rambling) thought process. I don't know about you, but I enjoy when people post these kinds of posts because it helps me see other points of view I haven't considered.
Anyway, your question is a good question and in all honestly, probably not much that I'd really use. I had heard that many of the X99 boards had (IIRC) USB issues, but when I asked here, people didn't seem to experience those issues. I thought the Z170 had some native support for a few things that the X99 required an add-on chip, but I could be wrong there and need to review again. The one major thing X99 does have over Z170 is a better upgrade path IMO - if you go with a 6800 now you can always upgrade to a 6950 down the road when prices drop and the cores are more utilized. With the Z170, you're likely only going to be able to move to another quad core in the future (KabyLake).
I'm debating between the 6800K and the 6700K now, myself, as I consider whether to upgrade off my trusty i5-2500k. I haven't pushed the 2500k to its limits, admittedly, but I'm considering the expense anyway to bring my personal PC up to more modern standards. The 2500k only offers PCI-E 2.0, not 3.0. Since I intend to invest in either the GTX 1070 or 1080 somewhat soon, I'd like to move to a CPU that provides the full PCI-E 3.0 bandwidth to the card. (And yes, I have considered picking up an i7-3770k but at over $250 on eBay, on average, I just can't justify investing my money into a platform that is starting to feel old, finally.)
I hear you. The only things which stopped me from going with a 6700K last fall were:
1. Lack of availability and therefore, price gouging was occurring.
2. The lackluster performance gain over Haswell.
On average, the 6700K is around 30% faster than my 2600K at the same clock. Sure, there are tasks where it is 50% faster, but that seems to be the exception, not the rule. I also nearly bit on the holiday sales on the 5820K and 5930K; the thing that held me back was that at the time, I don't think any of the current X99 boards promised to support BW-E with firmware updates. So I went ahead and passed again.
I then convinced myself that I would look at BW-E and once some of the leaks happened, planned on building a new rig around it. I seriously considered going with the 6950 when people told me it was going to be $1000 (I didn't believe them, but I had my fingers crossed.
) In fact, I have already bought some components for the new rig - a nice EVGA 1000W Platinum power supply I got for a ridiculous price and a 980Ti which I'm using in my current rig.
So where am I now? That's a good question and I'm still on the fence. My rig performs well but has odd USB issues that frustrate me sometimes. It is 5 years old and has been overclocked between 4.3 and 4.5 Ghz the entire time. KabyLake looks to have Optane support, but I'm not sure how crucial that will be for me and if it is worth waiting for. At any rate, I think what I'm going to do is hold tight until the fall to see what Zen brings to the table and also learn more about Optane. I figure if Zen can approach Ivy or Haswell IPC but give us 8+ cores for $600, that is a win no matter how you look at it - I could go that route OR Intel will drop their prices and I can stay with Intel.
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