What about Kaine Kane ? <| sep |> The trouble is that it ' s fairly impossible to predict when you ' ll need to upgrade . Skylake uses the same socket as Kaby Lake , but it ' s very unlikely that you ' ll be upgrading from Skylake to Kaby Lake because the difference is so tiny . You ' ll be upgrading maybe five years down the road , and at that point you ' ll be needing a new motherboard anyway . That said , DDR 4 RAM may still be standard at that point , so you may be able to reuse your RAM if you go with Skylake . I dunno . If you need to pay as little for an i 7 as possible , E 31231 may still be the way to go , but the i 76700 seems to me to be not that much more expensive . Looks like $ 50 , and the 6700 is faster by about 10 %. And it uses DDR 4 RAM . Are you certain a locked i 7 is what you need ? What will you be using the machine for ?