Advice on new system with my beefs. . .

[Soylent Joe]

Well, I was going just fine, and within budget, until I got to processors . . .

But where I blew it . . . I started looking at processors too long;
Intel Core i7-980X Extreme Edition Gulftown 3.33GHz 6 x 256KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Six-Core Desktop Processor BX80613I7980X ($1000)

build comes out at $3000. My wife's rolling her eyes again.

I think the 980x has that effect on a lot of people

 

[BarbaricSoul]

$700 motherboard? Heh, it's your money. Hope you find a use for all those PCIE slots

 

[JATownes]

Epic build. Do you have an idea what chassis you are going to put this in? With a build of that quality, I would like to recommend the Corsair 800d

 

[msurmint]

I already have a Thermaltake Xaser full tower case I'll use.

 

[CJCerny]

Almost all new hardware still has 32 bit XP drivers available for it. You'll want to double check that before buying your parts, though. The only modern hardware I might shy away from in XP is an SSD. XP doesn't support TRIM, which means you either have to manually run it from time to time on an SSD or just do without any kind of garbage collection for the SSD.

 

[msurmint]

ssd Trim

I expected to run it manually (in XP). Being my first SSD, I knew about it, but not how long it takes, was considering just putting it in my startup or something like.