http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapte...
If you care about NVMe, just get a $20 expansion card. Besides, NVMe SSDs are expensive. Mushkin Reactor 1TB for $210 yo.
Hell, the fastest NVMe SSDs directly go into PCIe lanes. So if I actually cared about the faster speeds, I'd jump to an Intel 750 SSD.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167...
Name me an M.2 NVMe SSD that is more cost effective than a Mushkin Reactor (1TB, MLC, maxes out the SATA6gbps bus, $200), or has faster I/O speeds than a 750.
Yes, if I had a laptop which only had room for a M.2 card, then maybe I'd get the Samsung M.2 card. But even if one were given to me for free, I'd rather get the $20 PCIe expansion card.
I can't think of a single situation where I actually need the onboard M.2 card on the Skylake motherboards, aside from the $20 convenience.
> roughly 20% IPC improvement (5% per gen give or take)
I admit, this is a good thing. But this is very very little, especially when you consider that the iPhone 5 to iPhone6 jump was 70% IPC improvement AND battery improvement, yet many people don't consider that enough of a jump.
http://www.imore.com/a9-processor-iphone-6s-and-6s-plus-70-f...
Soooo... FIVE years gets you +20% speed, while ONE year gets you +70% speed on phones. That's why desktops aren't getting upgraded.
> DX12_1 feature level IGP
You buy a $300+ CPU without buying a $100 GPU? The cheapest of GPUs are significantly better than IGP. Hell, if I cared about DX12_1 IGP, I'd get an AMD A10 for half the cost and twice the IGP performance with drivers that actually work on games.
Except I game in capacities that far exceed even AMD's superior IGP. I also care about adaptive sync / GSync technology, which isn't supported by Intel Iris. So I have a R9 290X. Intel's IGP doesn't even come close to a $100 GPU, let alone the midrange GPUs.
> CPUs with 128MB L4 cache which absolutely destroys chips that didn't have this for gaming
NOT on the desktop. Crystalwell is laptop-only, and 45W to boot. Compared to 20W Laptop chips, I don't see the Crystalwell L4 Cache actually being useful to the majority of people.
In fact, I don't even know of any laptops with Crystalwell that I'd recommend to anyone. Here's a challenge: Name me a good laptop with Iris Pro / Crystalwell. Hint: Macbook Pro use AMD dGPUs for a reason.
And hell, we aren't even talking about laptops. We're talking about Desktops, and Crystalwell is UNAVAILABLE in desktop form. Its irrelevant to the desktop user, even if you thought that paying $600+ for a CPU was cost-effective (instead of buying a Sandy Bridge E5-2670 for $70 from Amazon).
Basically, you got DDR4 RAM and IPC +20%. That's all that I actually think the last five years will get you. Or, you can buy a 8-core 16-thread E5-2670 for $70... hell... two of them, get a nice Server Board for $300 and have a BEAST of a machine.
http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/