Building new pc for school and medium gaming. Need advice.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

The lower end of the Skylakes (the Us, Ss and Ts) will likely launch first. The Intel roadmaps show Skylake's release being stretched out from Q3 2015 to Q1 2016; I'm not expecting Skylake K (the over-clockable i5 6600K and i7 6700K) to drop before Christmas.

R9 3xx cards from AMD are coming around the end of June 2015, as is the GTX 980ti (that'll be out of your price bracket though). Depending on performance and price of AMD's cards this might see price-drops by nVidia.

[Kagthul]

What other socket 1150 CPUs are there besides Haswell and Haswell Refresh?

Haswell. Thats the point; he said that "Z97 shipped before the Haswell refresh" as if that meant that Z97 boards were sitting useless for minths waiting for Haswell Refresh/implying that the purpose of Z97 was the Haswell Refresh, when this simply isnt true; Z97 was just the next step of chipset and when it shipped there were dozens of CPUs that were already compatible - Haswell.

For Z170, there arent any CPUs other than Skylake that would fit, and they arent goin to ship motherboards in August that have no CPUs to put in them. Z170 is coming in August; ergo, so is Skylake

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The lower end of the Skylakes (the Us, Ss and Ts) will likely launch first. The Intel roadmaps show Skylake's release being stretched out from Q3 2015 to Q1 2016; I'm not expecting Skylake K (the over-clockable i5 6600K and i7 6700K) to drop before Christmas.

That roadmap is a year+ old, and hasnt been updated since. If it were true, Broadwell-K would have already shipped; in reality, Broadwell desktop is all but DOA. If they werent releasing overclockable parts near August, there would be no reason to ship Z170 - H170 and The B-variant 10-series board would be enough. Also, moving forward, many S-model parts will be overclockable (The only two Broadwell desktop parts revealed so far are both S-series chips and both overclockable.

R9 3xx cards from AMD are coming around the end of June 2015, as is the GTX 980ti (that'll be out of your price bracket though). Depending on performance and price of AMD's cards this might see price-drops by nVidia.

Prices on the 980 and 970 will almost certainly drop as a response - hiw much depends on AMDs prices on 3XX chips.

[Deleted]

Haswell. Thats the point; he said that "Z97 shipped before the Haswell refresh" as if that meant that Z97 boards were sitting useless for minths waiting for Haswell Refresh/implying that the purpose of Z97 was the Haswell Refresh, when this simply isnt true; Z97 was just the next step of chipset and when it shipped there were dozens of CPUs that were already compatible - Haswell.

Which is pretty much the same thing cause if you had haswel you had Z87 and even then good quality Z87's had support for the refresh too. In other words was no point to buy a Z97 being shipped earlier. You also forget that mobo's being populated and spread accross the globe is not the same as cpu chips, even physically, more time is needed.

[Kagthul]

Which is pretty much the same thing cause if you had haswel you had Z87 and even then good quality Z87's had support for the refresh too. In other words was no point to buy a Z97 being shipped earlier.

Unless you were like, building a new rig after Z97 launched but before the Haswell Refresh shipped. Your assumption that everyone who needed a computer already had one for this entire time is just foolish on its face.

You also forget that mobo's being populated and spread accross the globe is not the same as cpu chips, even physically, more time is needed.

I haven't forgotten anything. For a company like ASUS to ship a useless product and let it sit on store shelves for months is stupid. They aren't stupid.

Yes, z97 shipped before Haswell Refresh. It was not, however, a useless product sitting on shelves doing nothing. It could be used with all of the existing CPUs.

Z170 only fits Skylake; if Z170 boards ship in August, Skylake chips are coming near then as well, or there would be no point wasting the money to ship product to sit uselessly on retailer shelves for months.