I planned on upgrading to skylake as well, but my rig runs fine now for all my needs. My next upgrade will target running a VR system. I recently had the opportunity to try an HTC Vive, and that **** is the ****! But I'll wait until prizes are more reasonable, and until more VR applications and games are available; I'm thinking maybe a year?

I've got a Skylake, wouldn't really bother upgrading to it if you've got a decent Haswell going on

I'm running a an i7-6700k into a Gigabyte board with wifi and some decent 256GB SSD w/ 16GB RAM. No gaming, runs a couple QHD displays. Mostly use for my home office & home recording studio. Obviously kills it for those purposes.

What you might consider instead of upgrading the CPU and all of that, is overspending a bit on one of the hot new cards like the 1080. That should last you a good while and run your VR within your current system.

Rig updates, new case on the way and just installed the following:
i7 kaby lake 7700k
Asus Maximus IX hero
Evga ddr4 16gb 3200

Rgb lighting looks great already and can sync with rgb fans that are coming with the corsair case. Kaby lake overclocked conservatively to 4.8ghz and stable. Gonna see what the price is on 1080ti vs titan xp in march and will hope there is a turn key waterblock version.

Not sure if OP is around anymore but just installed 1080ti that arrived this morning and 4k is much smoother. Plans are to install ekwb blocks this summer with green dye

Nice, I doubt that I will go 4k any time soon though. My eyes aren't that good, so I feel that would be wasted on me. As I mentioned, the next rig will be designed to run VR.

I don't know what the price difference is on 4k monitors but I know even with my crappy eyes, the sharper the monitor the better I can read stuff on it.

The price of the monitor is not the only thing, for what I do with my computer I also need a good graphics card, and if you want to have quality 3D graphics in 4k it has to be top notch atm; I'm not sure my 980 would be up to it with high settings.

That's true, but there's gotta be a cut-off, right? At some point, your eyes are bound not to be able to capitalize on a higher resolution. I sit about 1 meter from my 1080p 27", and I can't even remotely notice the pixels. Maybe I would get a bit more quality with WQHD, but I seriously doubt that going beyond that makes sense for me.

I've been out of Windows land for a long time so I haven't had to price graphics cards, my guess is 4k is going to be standard soon and all cards will support it, but that doesn't help now. You're right there is a cutoff where you won't really notice more pixels I just haven't seen it among my Apple retina display laptop and 5k iMac. All I'm saying is don't discount it without taking a look at what one looks like.

Bump. One of my system RAID1 SSDs died, and I could easily replace it while the system still worked on the remaining disc. I had to buy a 500GB disc though as I couldn't find a 250GB one on short notice. That's surely a practice I will continue on the next rig. For data I plan to go fully external though.

I also bought a 32" WQHD monitor a while ago; good stuff!

So I realized my rig is now 6 years old already, and 4 years after the upgrade! Stuff still runs mostly well on it, but e.g. Control could have run more smooth. Gotta make something happen next year! I'm still thinking VR, but don't know what to buy tbh. The latest HTC didn't have good reviews. Any thoughts?

Congrats!

If you're looking for a VR headset, Oculus Rift S seems like the best way to go since you have the PC already

So as AMD closes in on Intel the first time since I don't even know I'm thinking of jumping in on that Ryzen ****. Played a little on PCPartPicker; basically the configuration I have now, with a little bit more of everything. Two 500 GB SSDs for a system RAID1 again, and a single 2TB SSD for SW installs; data I'll handle externally. And two RTX, which I assume could be beneficial for VR? A bit pricey, but with a more sensible choice for graphics it would only be like 3k€ lol.

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 3.8 GHz 12-Core Processor (€599.00 @ Caseking)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Nepton 120XL 76 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (€99.11 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Motherboard: Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero ATX AM4 Motherboard (€399.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€191.71 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (€100.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (€100.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 2 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€286.90 @ Mindfactory)
Video Card: Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB ROG Strix Gaming OC Video Card (2-Way SLI) (€1348.90 @ Alza)
Video Card: Asus GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB ROG Strix Gaming OC Video Card (2-Way SLI) (€1348.90 @ Alza)
Case: Corsair Obsidian 500D RGB SE ATX Mid Tower Case (€256.80 @ Alza)
Power Supply: Corsair RMx 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (€210.07 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €4943.18
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-11-16 02:46 CET+0100

don't forget the mouse pad!

Check the games you plan to play to see if they have good/any SLI support. DX12 moved SLI support from the drivers to the game developers, to a large extent, and SLI is less frequently well supported or beneficial at all. Main reason to go multi card these days is for GPU compute work.

What's your backup routine? RAID 1 improves uptime but is not a replacement for backups as corrupted or infected data written to one drive will be written to both, and a board level failure could still kill both drives at once (i.e. power surge). I rotate 2 USB HDDs for weekly backups and use OneDrive as my offsite copy for pictures and documents. If it were me, and I could replace a failed OS drive out of pocket within a day or two while waiting on warranty replacement, I'd go for a single larger NVME rather than a RAID 1 OS drive. 2TB 970 EVO looks to be about 30 more than your current 3 drive setup but gives you a single drive to manage or partition as needed and all of your space is NVME fast.
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/product/vMMwrH

I recommend either going with a larger closed loop cooler or sticking with air cooling. The water cooling units mainly pay off in noise/temp when you get up to the 2x120mm or 2x140mm radiator units. I have a Ryzen 2700x system using a Corsair 2x120mm and an i9-7900x system using an Enermax 2x120mm system. Both of these perform great and are fairly quiet. Just make sure your radiator is sized to match the mounting locations available on your case. The Corsair 500D case you picked can take a 2x120, 2x140 or even 3x120mm radiator size. Also worth considering a Corsair closed loop unit just to have all your RGB running on the same protocol and controllable by a single software package.

Break down of cooler type advantages/disadvantages:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY2KeVwtbYU