Board is working perfectly for me, the price diff to the regular Hero was was roughly the price of a wifi/bt card, and I save a pcie slot. Fewer USB than the Hero, but it's enough for me.
And the LED headers are awesome (just picked up a cheap 5050 RGB strip, lovely)
For my 2 cents, if there are constraints in budget:
- The new faster SSDs are starting to reach diminishing returns in normal use. I have the 950 pro, while it's measurably faster than any SATA based SSDs, in day to day use I can't tell much difference (I used to have an crucial MX100…). Loading something in 2 seconds vs 1.5 seconds is not typically perceivable. Unless you run a ton of photoshop or video editing that needs high throughput...it’s generally better to have MORE SSD than a faster SSD. The newly announced 960 pro is even faster than the 950, but the bigger benefit is on thermal management vs 950 pro. The sticker (yes the label sticker) on the 960 now has a thin layer of copper that supposedly helps improve thermal headroom by 30% IIRC.
- If SSD speeds are important, another option is to use the U.2 connectors on the Alpha for the Intel 750 drive, where you can place it elsewhere in your case with better cooling. The M.2 slot on the alpha sits right under the 2nd graphics card slot, so if you are planning on CF/SLI now or in the future, thermal throttling on the M.2 card may become an issue.
- Same with RAM speeds. Many benchmarks and tests do not show any benefits for extreme RAM speeds, since the bottleneck in your system isn’t typically there. Again more ram is typically better than faster ram, but 16GB should be plenty for now, unless you run a ton of PS or video editing that can really use the RAM
- as others have said, getting the i7 6700k may be better improvement on overall performance if you drop down a bit on the SSD and RAM
What will you use the build for? That's critical to know where the money should be spent.
IMO, assuming the budget envelope given, stick with the Intel SSD or even consider cheaper SATA options like 850 EVO, and drop to lower speed RAM to subsidize the 6700k
Unless if this is for a gaming build, then keep the 6600k and spend the savings on the graphics card.
Side note: nice pick on the headphones, I have the same. Amazon typically runs specials quite often on the m50x, might want to look out for those
As for win7 on m.2, I haven’t done it myself but the general issue seems to be that win7 don’t have native drivers for PCIe/NVME drives, so making sure you have it on the USB stick should be sufficient. Win10 works well for me and I haven’t looked back…
