Its insane this never got to this point and the price difference vs America is outrages..i guess i will have to cancel the side grade for kaby...my mind cant shake the price difference 🙂

Economics 101. Seems to be more prevalent in Europe than the US. You get price gouged as it is but so long as there are people buying them at the ridiculous prices and their stock stays depleted because of it they will charge more than MSRP. Greed is a simple one word description. We get issues in the US with some items where a few buyers will snatch up all the stock then gouge severely. The end of 2016 saw this with the launch of the Samsung 960 series. There were places charging a higher price for a 500GB 960 evo that what I eventually paid for a 1TB 960 pro. Why, because they could. They had all the stock. If you want to save some cash just wait a few months, the gouging will come to an end. Im not one to jump on a major change like this anyhow. Brand new with no field testing. Flawed BIOS and other issues to work out that will happen within the first few months, at least to an acceptable degree. All board manufactures will experience it. Problem with this is Intel holds all the cards. They own the IP on the CPUs and they own the IP on the Z270 chipset that works with their CPU. They have been working on this for years and only released in in short term to those making the boards, basically long enough to throw together a manufacturing process with little to no R&D of their own. At one time Nvidia stepped up and started making chipsets. Problem is they cant roll out with the initial launch of a new platform. They have to do it on the backside and by the time they or anyone else gets their chipset to market the next generation is rolling out with just enough changes to make it where last years model wont work. With Intel slowing with updates its again feasible. Kaby Lake is a Sky Lake refresh. Same platform. You dont have to buy a Z270 for it to work. Matter of fact there are only two differences. 24 lanes to the PCH instead of 20 (still DMI bottle neck and the 16 lanes to the CPU remains unchanged) and support for optane that at this point is still a myth. Its not viable as an SSD replacement due to size restrictions, simply a non volatile cache for other SSDs that offers one advantage over dram for ramcahce. Its non volatile so if you take a power hit in the middle of a write you wont necessarily lose the data. On the other end of it the fact that it is non volatile works against its speed. You can still get better speed caching with ram and a level of data protection if you deploy a UPS. I would rather have seen an added controller just to address the M2 drives because in the end all the optane they throw at it wont fix the DMI bottleneck!

IMO there is only one new ASUS board with enough difference to make it worthwhile, the APEX.

ONE OF THE BIGGEST shops in Europe and ASUS Gold seal, I dont know if i can place the store link but these are current prices in Europe atm

M9 Hero MSRP 229 USD = 213 EUR + ~20% VAT = 255 EUR

(using USD/EUR 0.93089)

This is using 20% as an estimate of EU average VAT, and also not accounting for forex fees (typically 2%). Considering M9H is listed for 260 EUR at some places it seems to be in order.