I just got the same board today. H97M-E (CSM). I am using 32GB of G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3-1600 RAM but with an E3-1231v3 Xeon 3.4 GHz instead of the Core i7. The Xeon doesn't overclock and there's no built-in video on the chip (consequently it runs at 80 watts TPM and cost only $256). The video card is my Asus STRIX GTX 970 and I am waiting for payday (and April) for the release of the 256 and 512 GB Samsung 850 Pro M.2 SSDs. The only problem I see is the rather close location of RAM to the CPU socket but if you are water-cooling (or have a tall air cooler) this won't matter.