Any recommendations for my research? (Thinking...pentium i7??)
It depends on what you want to do with the PC. I was in the same situation back in 2010 and decided to spend some money on a system that I think should fit my requirements for the next 3-4 years. What I got was an I7-2600 system with 16GB memory, a HDD, SSD, ... and from my experience so far it's just the memory which sometimes gets exhausted (with a couple of VMs running of course)
André