What is the Best Micro ATX mobo for this build?

Have built with 4 Z97 ROG boards with 0 issues.

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1. I can't speak to your experience as anyone's success with any given board will depend upon what you want to do with it. My father-in-law had two same model hammers after he couldn't find it one day he headed out to buy a replacement. When he got home, his wife had found it. He used the 1st one for all his needs for about 10 years, and one holiday when wife was teasing him about his habit of replacing misplaced tools, he gave me the 2nd one, still with the cardboard thingie with price attached. I used it about 10 months later to reshingle my roof.... handle split in half about 1/3 of the way thru the job.

That was 8-9 years ago and when I finished the remaining 2/3 the house with a replacement, a year later reshingled the workshop / woodshop / garage. My son is using it now doing home remodeling. The most strenuous thing my F-I-L did w/ that hammer was hang a picture frame and make those lawn ornaments with spinning propeller thingie. The fact that my F-I-L had no problems with his hammer for his desired usages, does not change the fact that it failed quickly under sustained heavy usage.

For example, if you do not spend several days stress testing various high level OC's and saving / loading various OC profiles, you are not likely to run into the BIOS clock freeze bug that afflicted so many Z87 / Z97 users. The RoG line is targeted at serious overclockers and gamers. Not everybody users their puters that way on a daily basis. I never had the clock freeze problem until I started using certain BIOS features such as saving and restoring OC profiles. If you don't use those features, I'd expect one not to encounter those issues. But I was willing to spend $300+ for a Mobo specifically because of the feature set. I get no comfort from knowing that people who don't use all those features don't have issues. I have no way of knowing how you use your boards but just because 4 kids in one family don't have the flu, that doesn't mean that when 25% of the students called in sick and stayed home, they are all faking it.

The BIOS Clock Freeze Bug is well documented on the Asus forums. Link below shows a guy with three builds in his shop **at present**, so he has this bug affecting 100% of Asus boards in his shop . So even if we add your 4, we have 43% of Asus RoG boards being affected by the bug using those 2 sources. 3 of 4 Asus Hero / Formula RoG Z87 / Z97 boards I had my hand in were affected by the Clock bug ... that makes 6 outta 10 w/ issues from 3 individual's personal experience. But 10 is hardly statistically significant ... 376 newegg user reviews on the Hero VI is, 291 newegg user reviews on the Hero VII is.

http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?35490-Sabertooth-Z87-Bios-Clock-Issue&p=404524&viewfull=1#post404524
"I have 3 boards with this issue in my shop and EVERY client system I built has this problem. I have tried EVERY fix in this thread, nothing works for more then a few days. Flashed BIOS, reset to factory, replaced batteries. NOTHING. "

http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?45079-BIOS-Time-Clock-not-Keeping-Correct-Time-or-Date
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?35490-Sabertooth-Z87-Bios-Clock-Issue
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?49989-VII-HERO-Clock-never-changes-hour
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?49904-VII-Hero-Real-Time-Clock-Issues
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?35490-Sabertooth-Z87-Bios-Clock-Issue
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?33895-Hero-Time-Clock-Problem
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?46242-Hero-boot-shutdown-time-clock-error
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?47956-General-issues-with-the-Maximus-Vi-Formula
And it continued with Z97
http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?36676-Frozen-Time-Clock-in-UEFI-The-Fix/page33

Many returned the initial Asus Z87 boards to get rid of the external drive not waking from sleep issue....when I bought one for my own build, I waited for the 2nd stepping in which it was corrected... didn't help those that had a 1st stepping board tho.

2. Fortunately, as indicated by the numbers above, we have access to various sources of information which provide a much more statistically relevant number than 4.

One need only look at the newegg reviews to see the large uptick in user dissatisfaction from Z87 to Z97 and Z87 was not good to begin with.

14% of Hero Z87 Owners gave the board they built with just 1 egg
19% of Hero Z97 Owners gave the board they built with just 1 egg, that's a 36% increase in user dissatisfaction

17% of Formula Z87 Owners gave the board they built with just 1 egg
26% of Formula Z97 Owners gave the board they built with just 1 egg, that's a 53% increase in user dissatisfaction

How accurate are those numbers ? Using a population size above 20,000 does not change the numbers (< 1%) so let's use that.

http://americanresearchgroup.com/moe.html

For our Z87 sample of 376, we can be 95% sure that the margin of error is + / - 5.01%
For our Z97 sample of 291, we can be 95% sure that the margin of error is + / - 5.70%
For your Z97 sample of 4, we can be 95% sure that the margin of error is + / - 49.0%

We stopped using the Hero / Formula midway thru Z87 and went to the MSI / Gigabyte Gamings 5's. Prior to Z77, we had been an almost exclusively an Asus shop and had rarely used an MSI board because of known issues in previous generations.... boards performed well but their component suppliers left a bit to be desired leading to a % of boards having issues. Have not seen those issues since they adopted Mil Spec 4 component requirements, and now they have moved to 5. Gigabyte has always had string componentry and while the BIOS has always been cumbersome to navigate, it is much improved last few years.

But, like sports teams, tech companies may have a dynasty for 3-4 years and then someone else innovates and makes a run for the top spot. Things change.... in Q2/2010, AMD was in striking distance of nVidia with 44.5% market share, now they have less than 20%


3. The performance of the RoG boards was significantly lower than the much lower priced competition with comparable feature sets.

http://www.overclock3d.net/reviews/cpu_mainboard/msi_z97_gaming_6_review/10

The ranking is based on setting the board which recorded the highest combined fps in the gaming tests at 100% and ranking the others by fps as a % of the fastest one.

MoBo % of Leader

MSI Z97 Gaming 9 - 100.00%
MSI Z97 Gaming 5 - 99.86%
MSI Z97A Gaming 6 - 98.96%
Asus Z97 TUF Sabranco - 96.13%
Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 5 - 95.00%
Gigabyte Z97X SOC Force - 94.95%
Asus Z97 Maximus VII Hero - 93.67%
Asus Z97 Maximus VII Formula - 93.58%
Asus Z97 Maximus VII Gene - 91.69%
Asus Z97-A - 89.57%
MSI Z97 Mpower MAX AC - 88.20%
MSI Z97S Krait SLI - 71.01%

Why pay 50% (or 100%) more for a Hero (Formula) board to have it perform 6% slower ?

I still prefer the Asus BIOS over the competition's tho I am not willing to pay $70 for it. And I am encouraged by the Asus Z170's performance returning to where it was with Z77 and previous generations. In the GFX side of the equation, thier 7xx series and 9ss series were disappointing but the performance of the later released cards has been much better. All mid to high priced Z170 boards seem to be performing within 1-2% of one another. User dissatisfaction is still somewhat high with many boards breaking 30% combined 1 and 2 egg reviews, but other brands also have several boards breaking 20% combined 1 and 2 eggers, some also breaking 30%. But at this point, again, we still looking at 1st stepping boards and review numbers are still small so statistical significance just isn't there yet.

The only Z170 boards that have really stood out here with single digit % points on 1 egg reviews have been the Gigabyte G1 series.

If I continued to stay loyal to Asus thru Z87 / Z97 because I had good experiences in past generations, and ignored the documented differences in performance as well as the sharply trending user dissatisfaction, I would not have served myself or my users well.

I was much impressed by MSI's improvements this year in aesthetics (XPower Titanium board coating process), ruggedability (PCI-E slot reinforcement), quality (upgrade to Mil Spec 5) but I haven't as yet done any MSI or any other Z170 based builds. I could have just remained blindly loyal to MSI based upon what they delivered with Z97, but I am not going to jump in until I see how all those boards perform as well how satisfied board owners are. In 2013, the Ravens won the Superbowl, this year they got 5 W's and 10 L's; like sports, past performance is not a reliable indicator of performance in the tech world. Wasn't so long ago that the smartphone was defined by the Palm Treo ... where is Palm today ?

Thru the 1st Z170 steppings, no one has stood out performance wise and I am not real impressed with anyone at this point with regard to user satisfaction. I like the look of the new Formula (not as much as the Titanium) .... anxious to see the new Asus Formula VIII w/EK waterblock reviewed for performance.

I compliment Asus on returning to form performance wise with their Z170 line but the Z87 / Z97 record in the performance and user satisfaction arenas is simply what the numbers show. I'd enjoy doing another Formula build and have my fingers crossed that user satisfaction rebounds along with performance with this generation.