Nil wrote:
I'm planning to assemble a computer to replace my 11-year-old XP
desktop. This will be used for general computing and audio recording
and editing. No gaming. I'm planning to run Windows 7 64-bit on it, so
I want a CPU that's among the most recent and highest performing ones
that will support Win7. I might later feel the need to move to Windows
10, but not anytime soon. From what I've read, it seems that the Intel
i5-6500, i5-6600, or i5-6600k could make good candidates. Money is an
object of course, but not the primary one. My goal is stability and
longevity.
So, a request for comments...
- Are the Intel CPUs mentioned above good choices? If I understand
correctly, there may be some issues installing Win7 from USB devices,
but I can work around that.
- I still need to find a motherboard. It must have a PCI slot for my
old M-Audio AP2496 sound card. Any suggestions? I've had very good luck
with ASUS in the past.
Any thoughts you might have would be appreciated. I kinda lost track of
the state of the technology several years ago and I'm trying to get
back up to speed.
The motherboard/CPU business is a shambles in terms of the "sparse
matrix of support", so I doubt anybody really has a superior mental
model of what to do. It's just a mess, with a high chance of a buyer
getting burned when they "forgot to check something".
In any case, I think you've started in just about the perfect place :-)
I don't think going much further forward, even if the CPU was 5% faster
ounce for ounce, would really be all that much better.
Asus has some Win7 tables, but just seems to have lost their enthusiasm
for providing quick data for users of the two newer sockets.
Year Link
2004
https://www.asus.com/Static_WebPage/...el_Socket_775/
2009
https://www.asus.com/Static_WebPage/...l_Socket_1156/
2011
https://www.asus.com/Static_WebPage/...l_Socket_1155/
2013 1150 Haswell (internal regulator, this generation only)
2015 1151 Skylake,KabyLake? 270, 370
*******
i5-6500 1151 Skylake
i5-6600 1151 Skylake
i5-6600k 1151 Skylake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1151
Z170 Skylake, Kaby Lake (BIOS update)
Z270 Skylake, Kaby Lake
Z370 Coffee Lake
https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comme...t_for_windows/
"Z270 supports Skylake, the last Intel processor to officially support Windows 7"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake
"Kaby Lake is the first Intel platform to lack official driver support
from Microsoft for versions of Windows older than Windows 10,
although an enthusiast-created modification was released that
disabled the check and allowed Windows 8.1 and earlier to continue
to work on the platform."
And at some point, the quick power state change feature
might not be supported by the older OSes. Which I don't
think matters a whole lot. And the small processors
don't have internal NUMA or SMP features that would be
a particular problem.
So we could shoot for a Z270 with one PCI slot. The
PCI slot has to come from a PCI bridge chip, since
the PCH has been missing that for a couple generations.
It's quite common to need a bridge chip. One bridge chip
provides an entire PCI bus, with multiple chip selects
if needed. The two-slot PCI board only needs one bridge.
GIGABYTE GA-Z270-HD3 (rev. 1.0)
LGA 1151 Intel Z270
HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 One PCI slot, M.2 slot near CPU
ATX Motherboard $115
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813128974
ASUS PRIME Z270-K
LGA 1151 Intel Z270
HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 Two PCI slot
ATX Motherboards
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...82E16813132938
For audio support, you want to do a DPC latency check on those.
Which means tracking down a forum with the info.
There are probably a couple hundred boards to sift through,
one way or another. Take your time. You don't absolutely
need Z270, so there are other chips I could have sifted for.
Paul