Im running WINDOWS 7 on a Ryzen 7, X470 mobo with a 1080 Ti with very little stuffing around setting it up.
Too many scare stories floating around the web on long-winded workarounds, that either work...or fail. While I do have a tech guy do a housecall every four months, his skills can be better spent on other chores. I have never had a problem going legacy. My used OptiPlex 960 XP Pro rig has been good enough for the past 3+ years. Over 5000 hours, and still zero malware, but it's time to move on to Win 7 with slightly better hardware.
Since posting here I have decided on i7-4790k CPU, and I whittled down the motherboards to:
MSI Z97 Gaming 5
MSI Z87-GD65 Gaming
MSI Z97-GD65 Gaming
MSI Z97-G45
MSI Z97A Gaming 6
They all look about the same to me, so unless someone has a 'pick of the litter', I'll just buy the first one that crosses my path. The graphics cards are giving me a major pain. I require one with a VGA port, as I have no interest in fooling with the connectors, adapters, and gizmos that allow one to hook a VGA plug into some other sort of port. I've found only two so far:
ASUS GeForce GTX 750 Ti DirectX 11 GTX750TI-OC
Palit GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) DirectX 11 NE5X56T01142-1041F
If anyone can suggest other mid-to-high end cards with an
actual VGA port, let me know. Another problem is that I have no clue if any of the above are significantly better than the onboard Intel HD Graphics 4600, nor any idea how to find out. Couple years ago I replaced the onboard graphics of my OptiPlex 960 with a graphics card that everyone swears is worse than the onboard, so I'd like to avoid that mistake. This is how far I've gotten with the build to date.
But why are you stuck on using Win7?
In my case, I detest Win 8/Win 10, and I simply do not use junk I hate. Never did. Never will. Frankly I'm not real happy about moving on to Win 7, but as I dislike it a whole lot less than I detest Win 8/Win 10, that is what's on the menu. Win 7 will be my last M$ rendition before moving on to MX Linux, and will serve until such time as I'm comfortable making the transition....while the fact I don't much like Win 7 will provide extra incentive not to slack off.