[coolman]

I am thinking about building a new PC. It will be a desktop computer that will have Windows Vista Ultimate x64 with an Intel Core i7-3770T Processor and 16GB of RAM. Does anyone have any suggestions for maybe some motherboards that would be compatible with what I am thinking about so far?

This post has been edited by coolman: 16 March 2013 - 10:46 AM

[bonestonne]

What's making you stick to Vista x64?The hardware you've chosen so far looks good, but 8gb of RAM is more than enough unless you're going to be doing heavy video editing. You simply wont make any use of the extra 8gb at all.

As far as a motherboard, any Z77 of choice would be great, I'm partial to MSI or Gigabyte.

Are you going for an SSD for this build? Might be a good thing to go for if the machine is going to be completely current.

Also, if you aren't going to need hyperthreading, the i5 series will be plenty good enough, as it's still quad core, and quite powerful.

I would look at Win 7 or 8 at this point rather than sticking with the antiquated system that is Vista at this point (considering support will be ending in the not so distant future).

For a better picture of what you need, could you say exactly what the machine will be used for? If it's not going to be doing anything demanding, even going with an i3 will be more than sufficient.

[coolman]

bonestonne, on 20 March 2013 - 02:08 PM, said:

What's making you stick to Vista x64?The hardware you've chosen so far looks good, but 8gb of RAM is more than enough unless you're going to be doing heavy video editing. You simply wont make any use of the extra 8gb at all.

As far as a motherboard, any Z77 of choice would be great, I'm partial to MSI or Gigabyte.

Are you going for an SSD for this build? Might be a good thing to go for if the machine is going to be completely current.

Also, if you aren't going to need hyperthreading, the i5 series will be plenty good enough, as it's still quad core, and quite powerful.

I would look at Win 7 or 8 at this point rather than sticking with the antiquated system that is Vista at this point (considering support will be ending in the not so distant future).

For a better picture of what you need, could you say exactly what the machine will be used for? If it's not going to be doing anything demanding, even going with an i3 will be more than sufficient.

To answer your questions:
I am sticking to Vista x64 because I have too many Windows 7 machines (10) and XP machines (14) around.
I need the extra ram for mostly VMs.
Yes I am going with an SSD
I will need hyperthreading. I could use the extra power.
I am not looking anywhere towards Windows 8 because I don't have any respect towards it.
The machine will be used for very heavy video editing, running VMs, heavy gaming, lots of web surfing, E-Mail, Programming with languages such as x86 Assembly/PHP/C++/C, Photoshop with heavy graphic designing (I'm going to have to get an excellent graphics card for it), and many other everyday/business tasks.

This post has been edited by coolman: 20 March 2013 - 10:45 PM

[allen2]

As intel usb3 isn't working for windows before 7, if you need to stick with vista then be sure to pick a MB with another/a secondary supported usb3 chipset.
As for me, to come with my 3770T, i bought a Gigabyte Z77X-D3H that does a great job as i wanted to stick with XP.

This post has been edited by allen2: 21 March 2013 - 01:53 AM

[bonestonne]

What video editing program will you be using? I do a lot of serious HD editing with Adobe Premiere, and it s a necessity to have hardware acceleration, so you may need to keep that in mind. The Quadro series is a massive waste of money, so just look at mid to high end GTX series cards for equal or better performance for the money and power usage. If you're looking to use the T model CPU, power usage should be kept in mind across the board, not just the CPU.

I'm not sure I quite understand what having other 7 machines is important in regards to having another one, but whatever floats your boat, but the USB3 issue was part of what I had been thinking when you mentioned Vista. For a lot of VMs and video editing, 16gb will be useful then. For very heavy video editing, 32gb may be something important in the future. Web surfing and emails are irrelevant, even an Intel Atom can do all that. The focus is really Video editing and VMs.

For the CPU running around $300, you could also look at 6 core Xeons, they're generally cheaper than the 6 Core i7s, but just as much power on tap. Nothing you're doing seems to rely on having a high clock rate, so having more cores may be more beneficial than a high clock rate (multiple VMs running at once would benefit most).

allen2 mentioned the Gigabyte Z77X-D3H and it's one that I have used in the past and do like it's features, but that said, any Z77 should work fine for you, and be fully compatible going ahead with future upgrades. I would opt for mATX and keep size down, because it will help cooling (air cycles through the case faster) and you can also use a 350-450W power supply easily, 1-2 HDDs in addition to the SSD would do fine. No need for massive machines anymore unless having 7 expansion cards are important (don't really see that much at all anymore).

[allen2]

Just in case 3770T is a quad core (with HT you get 8 cpus). The good thing with 3770T is its very low consumption without the need of special mainboard. In the past i had to buy industrial motherboard and mobile cpu just to get low power computer with a decent power (4 core at least, HT isn't really that great for Virtual Machines).

[cdob]

I wonder, the manufacturer offers very few Vista 64 bit drivers for a Z77X-D3H: Audio and LAN
http://www.gigabyte....spx?pid=4144#dl
Is it possible to support all hardware at Vista 64 bit?

Contrary a GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3 http://www.gigabyte....spx?pid=3975#dl
The manufacturer offers Audio, Chipset, LAN, USB 3.0 and VGA Vista 64 bit drivers.
A i7-3770T and 32 GB RAM are supported.

This post has been edited by cdob: 21 March 2013 - 02:07 PM

[coolman]

bonestonne, on 21 March 2013 - 08:57 AM, said:

What video editing program will you be using? I do a lot of serious HD editing with Adobe Premiere, and it s a necessity to have hardware acceleration, so you may need to keep that in mind. The Quadro series is a massive waste of money, so just look at mid to high end GTX series cards for equal or better performance for the money and power usage. If you're looking to use the T model CPU, power usage should be kept in mind across the board, not just the CPU.

Mostly Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, and Sony Vegas.

[coolman]

Changing i7-3770T to i7-3970X.
See this
I found a board called DX79SR that has i7 support, SATA, Wireless LAN, Audio, Chipset, and USB 3.0 Drivers. 64GB DDR3 is the max memory, that's good cause I'm going with 16GB DDR3. Also has some BIOS updates. I'm going to try to find an SSD to use.
Drivers

This post has been edited by coolman: 29 March 2013 - 05:20 PM

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Well about the 1155 desktop consumer i7's, there was a lot of detailed discussion over at AnandTech among other places. I didn't see you mention why you didn't consider the "K" model which is of course unlocked. These are the main advantage that Intel has these days because you can easily crank them up well over 4 GHz with no extra cooling solution. I find this useful periodically when I have a CPU murdering set of tasks like final rendering of videos with effects ( something I think you are hinting at ). It is convenient to be able to reboot with extra horsepower and change it back later ( I don't leave them cranked up all the time ). Nice flexibility.

There are literally countless excellent 1155 boards out there, I like Gigabyte, but really all the major names are good. The chipsets supporting it are very well tested and although the sockets and chipsets will change soon, it is probably the single best overall platform Intel has made, and a worthy successor to the previous best, the 775. One nice thing about these consumer releases is that there are millions of threads and comments about them that are easily found for reference.

I would suggest that the EE Extreme models at 3x price need to be justified by whatever work you are accomplishing, but only you know that for sure. Just my opinion, but the cost difference is better re-routed over to more HDD space, higher quality case, power supply and peripherals. But if money is no object, ignore this opinion

Official Intel Specs ...

• Intel® Core™ i7-3770T Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz)
  
• Intel® Core™ i7-3770K Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz)
  
• Intel® Core™ i7-3970X Processor Extreme Edition (15M Cache, up to 4.00 GHz)

[allen2]

The 3970X is of course better but use the "old" LGA2011 socket that might not support newer cpus and it is nowhere near a low power consumption cpu (MAX TDP 150W). On the power consumption side the 3770T have a max TDP of 45W (less than 1/3 of the 3970X) and 3770K sit between when not overclocked.

[bonestonne]

I would never waste money on the Extreme Editions of any CPU. Simple as that.

If raw CPU power is something downright necessary, I would suggest looking at a dual xeon system. Populate a single CPU socket for the time being, and add a second CPU later when you run out of power. It's a better upgrade path than trashing an entire system every 4 years.

I modded the CS6 GPU compatibility file to include my GTX 660 Ti, and it was worth it 100$. Cheaper than any worthwhile quadro card, and allows me to also keep my temps and power usage down (all things considered). In Premiere Pro you can use the pre-render files to your advantage when doing a final export. This will be the only true way to take advantage of the beefy GPU which is only used by the Mercury Playback Engine. The playback engine saves pre-render files during the normal playback of the timeline, and you can select to use those when you use the export option. I strongly advise doing this to save time. You can do the same for nearly any nVidia GPU.

The 3770T will be fine as long as you use a mid/high end GPU to compensate for the rendering. Support for the Mercury Playback Engine on Windows is limited to only nVidia graphics cards that use CUDA technology. Simple as that. Also, if you're doing a lot of rendering, I would go with 16gb minimum with RAM. The new WD Red series hard drives would make for good scratch disks as well. I had a pair of WD Blue 640's, so that's what I picked in order to save a little money.

[coolman]

CharlotteTheHarlot, on 22 March 2013 - 03:07 PM, said:

Well about the 1155 desktop consumer i7's, there was a lot of detailed discussion over at AnandTech among other places. I didn't see you mention why you didn't consider the "K" model which is of course unlocked. These are the main advantage that Intel has these days because you can easily crank them up well over 4 GHz with no extra cooling solution. I find this useful periodically when I have a CPU murdering set of tasks like final rendering of videos with effects ( something I think you are hinting at ). It is convenient to be able to reboot with extra horsepower and change it back later ( I don't leave them cranked up all the time ). Nice flexibility.

There are literally countless excellent 1155 boards out there, I like Gigabyte, but really all the major names are good. The chipsets supporting it are very well tested and although the sockets and chipsets will change soon, it is probably the single best overall platform Intel has made, and a worthy successor to the previous best, the 775. One nice thing about these consumer releases is that there are millions of threads and comments about them that are easily found for reference.

I would suggest that the EE Extreme models at 3x price need to be justified by whatever work you are accomplishing, but only you know that for sure. Just my opinion, but the cost difference is better re-routed over to more HDD space, higher quality case, power supply and peripherals. But if money is no object, ignore this opinion

Official Intel Specs ...

• Intel® Core™ i7-3770T Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz)
  
• Intel® Core™ i7-3770K Processor (8M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz)
  
• Intel® Core™ i7-3970X Processor Extreme Edition (15M Cache, up to 4.00 GHz)

Now that you mention it, maybe I'll go with the i7-3770K.