New PC - Suggestions?

What is this PC for? I wouldn't bother purchasing the old lga1366 platform to build your pc on regardless of what it's for and I don't think you'll need 24GB of RAM.

I'd recommend the i7 2600k and the asrock z68 gen3 motherboard with just 8GB of RAM unless you need 16GB for autoCAD or what have you.

Thanks Crewton, I'll check those out. I wish I could say I was building a specific rig; gaming, etc. But I'm not. I plan to game on it, but will also use it for other stuff. The only reason I maxed the memory is because I also plan to do a lot of VM stuff for work.

Ah, well if 16GB of RAM isn't enough then you'll either have to wait for Ivy bridge motherboards which have 6 DIMM slots or go with the old but I'd hate to pay that much for 3 year old technology that is no longer supported.

Agreed. I've modified my wishlist to use the proc and MB you suggested. I also modified the RAM to be 2 sticks of 8GB. That way I can update later. Thanks for the feedback, it's really appreciated.

wow... 2x8 huh that's expensive... but i guess you're going with the upgrade path to 4x8... it's a shame when 4x4 only costs around 90.... how many VMs you going to be running... if you're not putting a bunch of VMs on the machine you might not need more than 16GB...

edit: with ram prices as low as they are and projected to continue dropping it might be worth it to get 4x4 now and upgrade to 4x8 later... might actually be cheaper...

slhpss - I agree, and I'm still trying to decide what route to go in terms of the RAM. As for the number of VMs... I will likely have about 3 servers running at a time, maybe one or two more running in addition to those on occasion. I could get away with 16GB for the most part. But based on experience, I know that available RAM always seems to be the weak spot when it comes to running VMs on a single workstation, and actually being able to do stuff in a timely manner.

But you're right about the RAM, dropping prices, etc. I'm not sure if it would be better to do 4x4 now, and upgrade to 4x8 later. Or do 2x8 now, and hope that prices for 2x8 drop enough in the future. Tough thing to try and figure out.

There is also the speed issue with the 2x8GB sticks. The ones on newegg are 1333Mhz and cas9 where as you can get 1866Mhz cas9 for $50 less.

what kinda servers you running? unless these are high traffic servers doing memory intensive work (databases) you could probably run them with 2GB each dedicated to them leaving you 10 for the hose system and it would work great.... this of course is dependent on traffic to said servers and the actual server types

Most will be mostly low-traffic i\o servers; authentication, directory services, and file\print. But a few will be SQL and reporting servers, and could use some more memory.

sounds to me like you know what you're doing... is this for a home setup or more like a small business? and btw I would get the 2600 not the 2600k because the k series doesn't support vt-d and since you're planning on VMs you may want that

slhpss - Thanks, I'm pretty good from the software side, but it's been a while since I've specced out a home PC. It will be for home, not a business. Thanks for pointing out the difference between the 2600k and 2600, I didn't know that.

it's kinda crap that the higher end CPU doesn't support that... it also does not support trusted execution or vPro if you plan on using those technologies. Will you be using domain services within your home network? I always wanted to setup a faux enterprise within my home, but always decided it was more trouble than it would be worth.

Yeah, I'm gonna go with the 2600 for sure. I had an AD domain setup at my house years ago - using old desktops. It was nice to play around with, but I simply don't do enough with that stuff outside of work to warrant keeping it around permanently. I'll definitely have a VM AD Domain for more testing, etc. But nothing online full time. That said... if you've never done it, would like to try it out, and have the VM or hardware to use, you should setup a domain, just to see what it's like to build from the ground up.

I've done it inside labs before... and administered forests before, but I'm just too lazy to play with it at home... I'm a linux nerd wannabe so I spend a lot of my time installing different distros, and running various servers on linux (apache, sql, smb, gaming servers, etc) I have enough systems laying around the house to pull it off though...