Streckfus posted a thread a few weeks ago which got me thinking, since my system has 5 years under its belt and the SSD and MB survived the (discontinued) coolant system rupture 4 years ago. The MB probably did suffer damage (just not yet fatal) from that event, since the graphics card lasted 3.5 years and took the brunt of the coolant exposure and finally "bellied up" on me.
 
I think the i7 Skylake (6700K) would be the optimal replacement for this machine, since the 2600K has been nothing but stellar for me. I do not edit video extensively, so extra cores, etc. are not going to do much. I did replace my failed ASUS GTX-580 with an ASUS GTX-970, and intend to carry this forward, so the question comes to the motherboard. The other point relates directly to Streckfus' thread, in that I very much want to keep my Saffire PRO 24 DSP in the loop (seems I must get the same TI card in anticipation of the forced Win10 upgrade).
 
I went with the ASUS for the first time when I built this machine, but then saw posts of "they used to be good [un-quantified]." My first thought is ASUS again, but do not use SLI/RAID in my machine, but would like the upper end USB (been sorting thus far on "USB 3.1" in the specs of MBs I have looked at).
 
Bottom line - when I went with my existing MB, it was due to the architecture and "anticipation" of what is to come. Any insight on the "MB skinny" for pros/cons with using the i7 Skylake CPU? Even "up and comings" would be nice, since this machine is not dead (yet).

Asus, AsRock, and Gigabyte make good boards.  Other ones like MSI do as well.

The i7-6700 really rocks. It's too bad the Saffire is finicky like that, my Motu runs just fine with a late model VIA chipset adapter

Quick feedback on this. I thought about failures in computers in the past, and realized that RAM degradation has been #1 on my list. I ended up getting 32GB of 2133 RAM (max capacity/speed that the MB can take now), and found out something interesting. With 8GB, the RAM rarely exceeded 50%, even with the pagefile disabled, so I was rather shocked to test the new RAM in a situation that I know was 50% in the old setup... and I got it to peak around 7GB. So, I am rather confused as to how Win7 is managing RAM when I can consistently get it over 6GB now, but before it was always saying 4GB(ish).
 
Anyway, wanted to throw that out there. 16GB would be fine, but the 8GB is definitely in the "not recommended" category.
 
As an aside... I benchmarked the machine and recouped all of the previous speed lost over time, but the SSD is still temperamental to the heat from massive read/write operations. I have always gotten around this by downloading to an HDD, and then installing from that (just massive writes seem to be fine for it). I also found the GTX 970 can definitely "hold its own" even though it is installed in a PCIe 2.0 slot (in benched very nicely against the GTX 980s in PCIe 3.0 slots).
 
Bottom line - RAM degradation, especially when RAM is limited, is something to bear in mind as a machine ages. Memtest never showed anything, but spurious BSODs are a good indicator. The new RAM had a "hard faults" of zero in several situations, so I will ride this machine out until I can truly kill it.