Recommend a mini-itx 170 motherboard for 6700k

[Lil'John]

Title states it but to clarify.

I am stuffing a 6700k into a SilverStone SUGO 05 case with 300W power supply. This case means I MUST have a mini-itx board. I'm also limited to four 2.5" drives.

This is going to be a developer box so I am not intending to go with extreme overclocking. I will be doing Win 8.1 with either a linux VM or dual boot. There will be absolutely no gaming and minimal web browsing.

I will be putting four Intel 535 SSDs (240GB) in raid 5 for "local" redundancy. Real backups will be off system/site. I've got disks hanging around()

Requirements:

• M.2 PCIe support that will work with four sata drives in raid 5
• Four or more sata 3 ports that work in raid 5.
• Mild overclocking ability
• 100% reliable
• minimal USB ports - mainly mouse and keyboard plus two more.

I will be driving 1 or 2 1080p monitors.

I am mostly brand agnostic... I've done ASUS with great success in the past. I've also done ASRock and SuperMicro with no issues.

I was eyeballing these two so far:
ASRock Fatal1ty Gaming Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac
GIGABYTE G1 Gaming GA-Z170N-Gaming 5

 

[Batmeat]

ASRock Fatal1ty Gaming Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac

This or an Asus/MSI equivalent in my opinion. I quit using Gigabyte years ago do to an experience I had building 10 computers for a small office. 6 of the 10 boards were DOA, and other 4 died within 1 month. Granted that was years ago, and newegg returns was awesome, but I lost a lot of confidence in the company. Others will argue that MSI has had quality control problems in the past, but I have never seen it personally.

 

[Raduque]

I used to use tons of MSI back in the day (Athlon XP days) but recently had two Gigabyte boards that, literally, went the distance - both are early C2D boards, one 965 chipset and one p35 chipset and they are still working to this day.

I would buy Asrock, Asus, MSI or Intel for consumer boards.

ECS used to be the value option back in the day, too, are they still any good? Are they even around anymore?

Edit: Oh yes, I should've mentioned, I'm building a miniITX system for my sister to replace an aging laptop, and I'll be using an Asrock H110M-ITX/ac for the build - ~$70.

 

[Lil'John]

Thanks for the input.

I went with ASRock Fatal1ty Gaming Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac.

For primary drive, I made use of SAMSUNG 950 PRO M.2 256GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive. I "had" to use the M.2 PCI-E version of an SSD instead of the more common NvM version because the NvM version would disable some of the four SATA ports

For "storage"/security, I went with four Intel 535 SSDs (240GB) in raid 10 instead of the 5 noted originally.

Overall, not too bad. Unfortunately, the Samsung drive wouldn't get recognized by Windows 7 no matter what driver "adjustments" I made to the USB media But no issues with Windows 8.1 for the install.

Figuring out the Raid 10 was the biggest pain in the rear ever. 120 pages of a manual which were basically 10 pages repeated in 12 languages