2. Are there any mobos that have been particularly well rated and are worth considering?
"It depends". Well what's actually important to you? All mobos are somewhat of a compromise.
If you want features / price. Then I would recommend you get the same mobo as me:
Gigabyte GA-Z170 Gaming 3
or
Gigabyte GA-Z170-UD3
Because it's got 2 'proper' m.2 slots and 3 'proper' PCI-3.0 4x or higher slots. And higher bandwidth USB 3.1 ports. Which is the best spec you'll find at that price.
However the BIOS kindda sucks a bit, in respect to the PWM CPU fan control. Wheras if you go for another manufacturer such as ASUS. Then you will get a better PWM fan control in your BIOS. But the flipside of that is fewer hardware features.
If you want to rely upon Intel IGP. Then there is the Gigabyte Z170-UD5 TH. Which has the proper implementation of USB Type C, including using it in Alt mode as Displayport, Thunderbolt 3 over USB Type C, 'proper' 4K support (at higher ramerates), HDMI 2.0 etc.
3. A recommendation for 16GB DDR4.
Corsair LPX 2400 (2x8GB) Black. Because they have 14-16-16-31 timings. Which is slightly better than the others at that same price bracket.
will more powerful ones come out later down the line?
As others have said, categorically 'no'. There is no reason to upgrade in terms of performance. What *might* come out later is some desktop part with better IGP graphics. But Intel haven't said anything whatsoever about that aspect yet. So nobody actually knows anything.
But when you look at the Skylake 6700K die photos, it's pretty obvious that a bigger IGP is the only thing they are likely to improve on it. 'cos one side of the chip is given over to i/o. Then other side is a huge block of IGP. There is no way they can put any extra DMI or lanes on the otherside without turning it into a Xeon chip, effectively. Yet Intel need to put in other business features for their enterprise chips. Hence different die from scratch required. Not fuses / feature disablement.
Perhaps if they were feeling really kind to us they might make a new die which ditched the IGP. Then there would be room in it's place for an extra 2 cores on the far side of all the bus / memory IO. But then the chip would still be limited by the IO (same fixed number of PCI-e lanes). So not much point to it really. Just get a Xeon instead.
