I'm squeezing everything I can out of my current Core i7 920 rig hoping that Intel does the smart thing and launches Sandy Bridge before Christmas rather than after (why miss the holiday sales rush?) Anyway, Intel works in mysterious ways, so I want to get ready for the Sandy shoe to drop and get my system ready ahead of time so that when I can finally buy the CPU and mobo, I can just plug it in and go.
I have a lot of questions:
1) Are the HSF mounting holes on LGA1155 similar to any other socket? Will I be able to use an existing high end HSF such as a Tuniq Tower, or do I have to get a special mounting bracket?
2) All the LGA1155 mobos I've seen to date have 4 RAM slots. I guess that would make the best configuration 4x4=16GB. Any ideas of what speed/type of RAM would best? Note that this is not the K CPU, so I am not overclocking.
3) I want a small SSD boot drive and then a conventional 1TB RAID (2x1TB Hard Drives). The more I read about TRIM and garbage collection the more I'm confused. Would an SSD boot drive easily/quickly exceed the limit of about 5,000 read/writes that seems to be the time many of these SSDs go south?
4) This rig will not have any cards in any slots as I'm using the 2600's GPU and onboard audio. What is a recommendation for a good, solid, fanless CPU?
I have a lot of questions:
1) Are the HSF mounting holes on LGA1155 similar to any other socket? Will I be able to use an existing high end HSF such as a Tuniq Tower, or do I have to get a special mounting bracket?
2) All the LGA1155 mobos I've seen to date have 4 RAM slots. I guess that would make the best configuration 4x4=16GB. Any ideas of what speed/type of RAM would best? Note that this is not the K CPU, so I am not overclocking.
3) I want a small SSD boot drive and then a conventional 1TB RAID (2x1TB Hard Drives). The more I read about TRIM and garbage collection the more I'm confused. Would an SSD boot drive easily/quickly exceed the limit of about 5,000 read/writes that seems to be the time many of these SSDs go south?
4) This rig will not have any cards in any slots as I'm using the 2600's GPU and onboard audio. What is a recommendation for a good, solid, fanless CPU?