Build critique? Please, and thanks : ) (WoW)

[Ellay]

I would get a NVMe M.2 solid state drive instead of the SATA. The motherboard you picked out supports it and the gains are huge.
Check out the Samgsun 960 Evo or the Pro series, it's 3200 mb/s read and 2100 mb/s write speeds. This is a massive difference compared to the 550 mb/s and 520 mb/s respectively.

Additionally looking on amazon, the M.2 type seems to be cheaper.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

I would get a NVMe M.2 solid state drive instead of the SATA. The motherboard you picked out supports it and the gains are huge.
Check out the Samgsun 960 Evo or the Pro series, it's 3200 mb/s read and 2100 mb/s write speeds. This is a massive difference compared to the 550 mb/s and 520 mb/s respectively.

Additionally looking on amazon, the M.2 type seems to be cheaper.

I have run two 950 Pro NVMe units in my system, and I note two things of interest.

First, the OS (and install drivers and recovery tools) support is still maturing for the M.2 PCI-E devices, so that's something to keep in mind with regards to backups and/or reinstalls.

Second, at the time I put my first 950 Pro in, I could get two 850 Evo drives for less money, get the same space, and better random write performance. The read performance of the single NVMe device was roughly on par with a 3-drive RAID-0 SATA SSD setup, with the write performance being +/- ~30% depending on whether I was testing sequential or random (small queue depth) writes. I ended up going with dual NVMe devices, which is what it took to get the actual listed performance out of them, even in synthetic benchmarks. It's faster loading up 5 WoW clients than dual-850s but it's not enough that I'd ever subject myself to the...I suppose "unpolished" feel of getting them configured and running Win 7. I realize most folks are doing Win10 and it would have been easier to do that, but again the tools I use for recovery in the event of system failures were not happy with the early M.2 NVMe device support. That could also have been a BIOS or chipset thing. /shrug YMMV

[edit] FYI, I'm using an MSI Gaming 7 z170a, which looks like the same base chipset as the OP listed, so....

[Deadpete]

Thanks for the responses guys.

My buddies that were assisting me with the build seem to have pretty negative opinions on M.2. Overpriced, undersupported, would create barely a difference for me.

They might possibly be running on outdated info? I'm not sure.