Ordered the Asus X99 deluxe with the 5930k, and 32 GB RAM. Seems the faster RAM is still expensive and wasn't any available for shipping currently, so I got rather cheap 2133 mhz and will do with that for now and get 64 GB ~3Ghz once more vendors are available and prices drop. Already have 2 x 512GB Samsung 840 SSDs + a couple others.

Ordered a cheap PCI-express SSDs too.. that probably won't be of much use.. but gonna try and see if it can work with PCI passthrough in VirtualBox or VMWare to install a virtual machine on.

Yeah, i ordered the X99-Deluxe and 5930k as well. Got 4x8 GB of G.SKILL 2400 memory; I want 4 slots open for later (probably to drop in a 4x16 kit in 2016 for a total of 96). G.SKILL isn't my favorite, as I've had dead modules from them in the past (more than once). Their customer service has always been really good about getting it replaced though. Still too bad that Corsair isn't making 8 GB modules. Would've put a few extra bucks in for that.

The Asus was one of the few Thunderbolt ready boards, which surprised me. I thought Intel's new flagship platform would be all over the Thunderbolt thing, but apparently not? I don't get it. There was a big surge of Thunderbolt in Z87, and then it kinda died off for some reason. In any case I want it, so it was down to Asus and Gigabyte, and Gigabyte's board had a lot of gamer/overclocking garbage.

As far as the PCIe/M.2 SSDs... there aren't really a lot of options, and they're hideously expensive from what I've seen. I'm just going to get the 850 Pro for the main drive, and the array of WD Blacks or similar. The VM pass-through idea is cool though and I'd like to hear if that works (and if it's preferable to raw access to a SATA drive).

Choosing a case might be the hardest part. I went to the local Microcenter to check out some cases today evening and good god do most of them suck. Right now the Corsair C70 is the easy front runner.

As far as actual performance for dollar... Z97 and 4770K is almost certainly the better choice for nearly everybody. I had misgivings about doing the X99 thing several times during all this. Ultimately though, I'm doing enough production-type work, notably 4K video, that these more aggressive platforms are worth it. A traditional "recommended" system for that sort of thing is dual Xeons. Go price out the CPUs and motherboard for that. Six cores and a 3.5 clock is just about perfect for me. Plus the X series platforms are meant to last a good bit longer, and I'm anticipating being able to make effective, useful upgrades through 2018.

I'm always torn -- On one hand I would love to have something like that, so its one of those "when I'm wealthy" dreams; but on the other, it seems like a lot of the things I might care to do with 8 cores, if it really can be made parallel that well, might be equally well-served by a cluster of less expensive machines. If it were just the difference in processor cost, it'd probably be a win for a single, "bigger" system, but taking into account the new chipset and high cost of DDR4 today, becoming an early adopter is a hard sell.

I upgraded to a 4770k last year though, so I'm not hurting terribly for an upgrade. Maybe nextime they do a major refresh of the -E line, if I find myself without any more-pressing purchases.

I guess I'm just anchored to some semblance of personal practicality -- these midwestern roots of mine run deep.

Actually, though, I'm kind of interested to see what will come out of the Xeon-socketted Knights Landing -- 72 silvermont cores running at (reportedly) ~2.4Ghz, and with 4-8 GB of fast RAM on-package, each with 512-bit-wide vector instructions. Given the combined floating-point throughput (2Tflops single-precision, 1 TFlop double-precision, per socket) and x86 compatibility, I've kind of wondered if they won't be ideal for hosting a game's build system -- they'd handle both compiling and media transformations really well.

I guess I'm just anchored to some semblance of personal practicality -- these midwestern roots of mine run deep.

It's also the difference between 'work' and 'play' machines. These hardware costs are trivial when balanced against how much of my time is spent waiting for builds, for example. I mean, I'm waiting for a build as I write this. It's also an experiment for me, finding out just how much hardware I can throw at the problem of day-to-day downtimes. The other half of the experiment is finding out whether going for a higher class platform is worth it. Which is to say, X99 doesn't really make sense above Z97 for normal use except for a few rather specific tasks (which I do happen to need). But does it lead to a longer viability for the computer and even out cost-wise?

Still don't know the answers, but it's something I'm eager to find out. If it were just a home/gaming machine, Z97 would've made far more sense. But if the gigantic CPU and storage cut a good chunk out of my compile times, that along will be enough to make me quite happy.

I'm busy finalizing some misc specs on the machine. Looks like it'll be Samsung 850 Pro boot drive (512 GB), Crucial MX100 512 GB x2 (RAID 0) data drive, and WD Black 4TB x3 or x4 RAID 0 large files drive. VS had damn well better be blazing with the ridiculous amounts of processing power I am throwing at it.

Oh, no -- totally get it. I was mostly responding to Frob. If you can use the extra 2 cores, that hex-core Haswell-E is totally worthwhile, IMO -- actually, I might even suggest you just go whole-hog an get the 8-core, simply because once you've chosen the Haswell-E, you're already fronting all the platform expense. Or, maybe you're planning to upgrade when they refresh (Haswell-E platforms, like Xeon, aim for twice the socket longevity of the consumer platforms) down the line.

If was building a serious workstation I might be tempted to swing the an -E platform -- I considered it last year when I build my last desktop PC even priced a system out, but it wasn't worthwhile, given that Haswell-E was barely in sight (and now we see it, nearly a year later) and the old platform was on its last legs. So I built a nice, small ITX gaming rig instead -- I do most of my serious work on my laptop anyhow (no match for a high-end desktop, but quite tricked out for a laptop).