What components to complement an i7 system?

[Tuscan]

Hi all - its been a very long time since I posted here. So long ago in fact, that technology has moved on...a lot.

I'm looking to self-build an i7 920 based system to replace my 5 year old (yes, its THAT old - but served me really well). A 920 is more than sufficient for my general needs - I am not a gamer, but I may like to do some video work on the new PC.

What I would like though is a quiet, air cooled PC, with potential to maybe do some over clocking. That means a passively cooled graphics card too.

Could anyone kindly recommend a graphics card that is 1 Gb and <£100, that would go well with say an Asus or Gigabyte motherboard, decent (without being OTT) memory - I would guess 2-4Gb, and a pair of quiet 500Gb hard drives (presume SATAII 300 spec with 16Mb cache).

Finally, what wattage PSU would be required - and which OS would people go with for this? I was thinking 64 bit version of XP Pro, but would 64 bit Vista be better or worse (noting that is actually less expensive than XP).

Budget (ex VAT) is £450 for CPU and Mobo, <£100 for graphics, £100 for 2 x HDDs in RAID, plus ? for memory.

I'm sorry to ask what is probably a boring question - but like I say, thinks have changed quite a lot. Just hope that this system lasts as well as the old one, which has been an excellent Athlon XP with 1Gb of RAM!!!

Thanks.

 

[Tuscan]

Thanks for that. That looks like a smiliar, if not slightly higher, spec. I probably would not go for more than 4Gb RAM, and as I'm not a gamer, I would go lighter on the graphics card. You may have convinced me to take the Vista 64 path. I guess that Windows 7 is not a long time off in the grand scheme, but perhaps XP is a false economy when it costs more, may not make as efficient use of the rig's power/potential.

with thanks.

 

[Tuscan]

Thanks chaps.

The PC would be very general in use. I use it for home and office: therefore the usual Office 2007 applications, heavy email use, account keeping, playing, ripping, burning DVDs (may try ripping Blu Ray when the time comes), iTunes, desk top publishing, photo editing with potential to video edit too - including archiving old Hi8 analogue video onto DVD. Perhaps the very occasional time, but as a father of a 2 year old - I doubt I'll be playing many games for a while unless they are with/against him!

Last machine lasted me 5 years. I run Diskeeper 2008 and NOD32 on my old PC (and laptop) and it has kept everything running very nicely indeed. I have not had to reformat and reintsall XP for 4 years as the machine has been faultless.

Big requirement is quiet air cooling, at least whilst not overclocked - and reliability. I leave the machine on from morning till night so I can remote access it using Logmein. I also like something that fast boots and also has RAID for data security, just incase a drive goes **** up if you know what I mean.

Was also wondering whether a decent SSD drive may be good for the OS and keep data on the RAID. Would that mean a fast boot up??

Thanks again.