ofthomas - thanks for following up. yes, money is not a concern, but i don't like spending money on things i don't need / won't use. and, also, i've read these threads (and others on some of the techie sites - but i prefer asking on here, since the responses will be more trading-related, and not "must get 3d for the latest and greatest, 3l173 here"
i've decided i'm going to get my backup machine first so i can play around with that, and see if certain things work/don't work well.
because it's my backup machine (which does other junk, including kids playing on it), i'm going to get a HD with between 500GB/1TB.
i'm going to go with the 1607 core (your comments and link were helpful; i'd rather not spend on that area; i used to tell non-techies that "get increased memory first!")
since i won't be doing tons of computations, i've decided non-ECC will be fine. was worried about the cap at 8GB, but i don't think that should matter either. my mindset was always "double what MSFT recommends for their software", so i think i'm fine at 8.
i'm going to go with a dual monitor rather than quad, because if i ever start using more monitors, i'll just get a new video card. so getting the nvidia 300,
one dvi-> vga adapter (don't have any), DVD RW drive, speaker card, recovery disk, and what i need to check now is SSD. i hadn't seriously considered it before, but will now check into it more because of your post. i knew SSDs are more reliable, and that's obviously a nice feature to have; it also may be something to have on my main machine, but not my backup.
so now i've got a pretty good guideline for my unit. i'm going to check outlet for the next few days, see if anything special comes up (ie. if it's lacking memory, i'll just get more; if it's a slightly different video card or hard drive, no worries), and if not, i'll get one new.
thanks for all your suggestions!
i've decided i'm going to get my backup machine first so i can play around with that, and see if certain things work/don't work well.
because it's my backup machine (which does other junk, including kids playing on it), i'm going to get a HD with between 500GB/1TB.
i'm going to go with the 1607 core (your comments and link were helpful; i'd rather not spend on that area; i used to tell non-techies that "get increased memory first!")
since i won't be doing tons of computations, i've decided non-ECC will be fine. was worried about the cap at 8GB, but i don't think that should matter either. my mindset was always "double what MSFT recommends for their software", so i think i'm fine at 8.
i'm going to go with a dual monitor rather than quad, because if i ever start using more monitors, i'll just get a new video card. so getting the nvidia 300,
one dvi-> vga adapter (don't have any), DVD RW drive, speaker card, recovery disk, and what i need to check now is SSD. i hadn't seriously considered it before, but will now check into it more because of your post. i knew SSDs are more reliable, and that's obviously a nice feature to have; it also may be something to have on my main machine, but not my backup.
so now i've got a pretty good guideline for my unit. i'm going to check outlet for the next few days, see if anything special comes up (ie. if it's lacking memory, i'll just get more; if it's a slightly different video card or hard drive, no worries), and if not, i'll get one new.
thanks for all your suggestions!
