Santa is here and I need help

[RiSki]

Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas to all,

After 10 years, Santa IS coming to my house. 10 years ago Santa brought me a new motherboard for Christmas and I assembled my XP Pro box (as shown in my Profile). And I know for a fact He will repeat his gift giving this Christmas...cause I just wrapped it

I hope this is the beginning of your Holiday spirit of giving your much needed advice and it continues until my new Win 7 PC is running. To start it off, I have assembled a list of components for this new box and wish to get as much comment and criticism as possible. I'm a Geek in the making, so I still look for answers.

Here's my list to start:

Processor: Intel i7 875K
Heatsink: Thermalright Cogage True Spirit
Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E Pro (Thank you Santa)
Power Supply: Corsair AX850 or AX750
Memory: Corsair CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 (for starters)
Videocard: Sapphire Radeon HD 6870
Soundcard: Onboard for now
Speakers: Old Klipsh 2.1
Hard Disks: WD Caviar Black 1 TB Sata 6GB/s (to start)
Optical Disk (Blu-Ray): Lite-On iHBS212 12X or LG WH10LS30K 10X (future)
Opticak Disk (DVD): Lite-On iHAS624 or Optiarc AD-7260S
Case: Corsair 600T
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium (Family Pack) 64 bit and
Windows XP Professional SP3 (dual boot or virtual drive?)

Hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas and I welcome your thoughts and experience,

RiSki

 

[mailpup]

As long as you are buying a 6GB/s hard drive, you might as well add a 6GB/s SATA cable too. I know the motherboard comes with a couple of SATA cables but it's not clear to me whether they're SATA II or III.

 

[RiSki]

Nice catch mailpup. I'll add a couple to my shopping list as I go along here.

This is why I head for the forums for any work I perform. Seems like the motherboards have advanced a tad in the last 10 years

 

[SNGX1275]

Just looked at your current system, nice mobo Onboard sound has advanced a lot in the last 10 years too, so I don't think you'll need to upgrade that real fast.

I think you'll like 7 well enough that you won't need to set up a dual boot with XP. I'd run XP in a VM, you'll have enough power with that hardware that it isn't going to slow you down in 7. Although I didn't see how much RAM you are getting. If you are just keeping XP around for some crazy program that won't run in 7, then I think you could probably get by giving the VM like 256MB of RAM and only installing XP without service packs - that is, if you are real limited in the amount of RAM you are going to start off with in that system.

I think cheap (low price) dvd drives now don't really matter, so either of your choices will be fine. I don't know a whole lot about the other stuff so I'll let others comment on that.

 

[RiSki]

Your comments are very welcome SNGX1275 cause I didn't get into any reasoning. Didn't want to come of dumber than I am :haha:

I was tossed on which way to go with XP Pro without ever running anything in a VM before. I have dual booted and that was easy enough, but the virtual world has come a long way too. I think Virtual Box would be my starting point into this realm. I'm keeping XP alive mainly for an Epson printer that doesn't have 64 bit drivers, etc. And I still have 2 unused disks I've never installed.

As far as memory, I plan to start with 2-2 GB sticks and leave some room for 2 more. Not sure that the memory will have clearance with the CPU heatsink if I populate all 4 slots. In my research I read a couple times about memory clearance issues and that was the reason for picking the heatsink/fan I selected.

Used to stay in touch more when I was the tech person for my wife and 2 daughters. After buying them all Macs 2 years ago, I don't have virus and malware problems to speak of. Still keep an older IBM Thinkpad around updated with XP just in case one of the girls needs a backup in college...so far so good. Dangit, can't find any wood to knock on

Thanks again for filling in the blanks.

 

[RiSki]

One issue that has me flipping a coin is the power supply size, 750 or 850?

I can almost bet I'll never go with a second video card, but could add other hardware in the future. Guess it shows how I keep my PC around for awhile