It's nice to have the newest tech, but when previous generation products go on sale, you can save a chunk of change without sacrificing much in the way of performance. Such is the case with Intel's Z170 chipset, and specifically the Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero/Whetsone that is available at Newegg for $100 after a $50 mail-in-rebate.
That's half off the MSRP, and quite a bit cheaper than what it typically sells for. It also beats the deal at Amazon, which has it listed for $184 with a $35 mail-in-rebate available, bringing the price down to $149.
The Z170 chipset is now two generations old, with Intel recently introducing its Z370 chipset for Coffee Lake. Like the Z270, there is no upgrade path to Coffee Lake on a Z170, though it does support Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs.
Compared to Z270, the Z170 offers four fewer PCIe 3.0 lanes (20 total) and does not support Intel's Optane Memory technology. Otherwise the feature-sets are interchangeable.
As for the Asus ROG Maximus VIII Hero/Whetstone, it supports up to 64GB of DDR4-3600+ (OC) memory and has three PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, three PCIe 3.0 x1 slots, six SATA ports, two SATA Express ports, and an M.2 socket.
Other features include one-touch overclocking, a water pump header for liquid cooling setups, a digital power controller, and of course the nifty Q-connector that Asus includes with many motherboards to make connecting front panel cables easier.
You can grab this motherboard here.
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