Thanks!

Yes, the Core i7-6700K, along with good DDR4 RAM will do a little bit better than a Core i7-4790K from a CPU/memory perspective (depending on the application or benchmark), but the difference is not going to be huge. The biggest advantage with Skylake is the increased I/O capacity from the Z170 chipset, plus the fact that it will support 64GB of RAM.

Micro Center has a house brand called PowerSpec, where you can probably find something pretty close to what you are looking for
http://www.microcenter.com/product/453039/X503_Desktop_Computer

Any white box maker could probably build you something that would work quite well. You would just give up some flexibility in picking exactly what components you wanted, but you would not have to worry about the details of picking out parts and putting them together.

Thanks for again going to the effort to put your latest pc specs together. I’m looking for a pc that is more geared to in-memory SSAS cube development than SQL databases. From what I have read (such as this: http://www.powerpivotpro.com/2015/05/some-good-power-pivot-power-bi-computers/) I’d be looking at fast cpu’s and fast ram… and not worrying about the disk speed. This would suggest the new I7-6700K processor + DDR4 ram instead of your suggested lower end set-up right???

A couple of questions:
1. Do you have any vendors / affiliates that put together pc’s for a good price based on your specs for your readers… i.e. I don’t really want to source and build pc’s, worry about assembly, putting diamond paste on the cpu’s etc
2. Do you have a SSAS tabular (in-memory) spec’d pc instead of general SQL development spec’d pc?

I’m sure your listed specs would suffice, but if I could crunch through those aggregations faster with not much extra cost, then it would be happy development days!!

Thanks,
Tony