FPGA Dev board recommendations (Mojo V3 vs Digilent Cmod S6?)

[theramenman]

Hi everyone, this is my first post here so sorry if I selected the wrong section, but anyway:

I'm a uni student looking for a FPGA dev board on a tight budget. I can spend maybe $75 max. I was looking at some popular options and I can get a MOJO V3 for around $39 or the CMOD S6 for around $69. Both of these are within my price range and seem to have somewhat similar features (except the Mojo seems to lack external RAM).

I'm just trying to self learn VHDL mostly (I've used Xilinx FPGA's before for some intro courses but that was using the schematic view in Xilinx ISE, not with VHDL or Verilog) and I have a large amount of parts (common IC's, switches, buttons, LED's, breadboard, etc) sitting around, so not having a bunch of things on the board itself to fiddle around with isn't a big issue for me since I can just tack my parts on a breadboard. Anyone here have any experiance with either and could recommend one? Or maybe I should get the Digilent CMOD A7 since its slightly newer, has some extra flipflops compared to the older models, etc for around $75?

[KE5FX]

The CMOD A7 looks really handy.  I'd go with that.  7-series has some advantages over the old Spartan6 chips, notably the use of up-to-date software.

[theramenman]

I caved and forked over the extra bucks (Digilent charges an arm and a leg for shipping: $16 for their cheapest option! Turns out mouser is an authorized distributor, 3.99 shipping on their end) for the CMOD A7. You get nearly 4.5 times the slices and upgrades in almost every other aspect for about $5 more.

Just a reference for others who might be looking at the Mojo V3 or CMOD S6, keep in mind that the CMOD S6 is more or less deprecated in terms of support from digilent and the amount of tutorials available for it are far less numerous. The Mojo V3 is a pretty good bang for buck at $40 (get it on ebay) than both of them and seems to come highly recommended on reddit and other places.