How much for a Skylake-based system? Very rough and ready component selection from MSY and PC Case Gear.

If you want to cheap out a bit, you can tweak a few little things:

• Select a basic H170-based motherboard: Gigabyte or ASrock will be somewhat cheaper, but it still bottoms out around $150. The cheap Asus H170 board is $160 and it uses DDR3 RAM (widespread, cheap, will become "old" in ~2yrs)
• Use DDR3 RAM: it's cheaper and still very performant, just not future-proof. You can get 16gb of DDR3 for $115 at MSY, but will need to buy a mobo that takes it
• Use slower RAM: Baseline DDR4 RAM is 2133MHz speed, very slightly cheaper at about $140 from MSY
• SSD: you can cheap out a bit with a different brand SSD and maybe save $20
• Case: the P280 is a fancy noise-dampened case. You can pick a basic one and maybe halve the cost

Choice of CPU

Current socket is LGA-1151.

• i7-6700 = 3.4 GHz + 3/4/5/6 boost increments, TDP of 65W
• i7-6700K = 4.0 GHz + 0/0/0/2 boost increments, TDP of 91W

April 2016

Using my existing GPU, that's a total of 1458 for the cheaper choices, and 1569 for the expensive ones (Windows Pro and Gaming mobo).