Ant wrote:
On 12/7/2010 4:35 PM PT, Paul in Houston TX typed:

I am thinking of replacing my current motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc. to
an Intel i7 950 CPU, GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD3R motherboard, and new RAM. I
am still going to use my old, updated Windows XP Pro. SP3 (don't need
64-bit and newer Windows at this time since my old softwares still
work). Is this going to be OK?

My current computer specifications (primary computer) details can be
found at http://zimage.com/~ant/antfarm/about/computers.txt ...

Thank you in advance.

YES!
Excellent system. I made a similar system a few months ago.
X58-ud3r, 6g ram, core i7 930, two 500g black caviar drives
in Raid 1 mode, nvidia GTX470 vid.
The base cpu speed is 2.93 but it is quite happy running
at 3.67. The mb says it does not support 1600 ram
but it runs great with 1600 c7 ram. Ram tends to get
flakey at 1950 mhz. System unstable past 4ghz on stock cpu fan.

You have probably read about the squeaking cpu.
Mine did it once briefly but it was due to extreme overclocking.

Squeaking? I forgot to mention that I don't do overclocking/OCIng.

If you don't o/c then you may not have that problem.
You can always turn off the auto step voltage adjust for
when you do o/c. That stops the squeaking.

BTW, the system doubles as an excellent space heater.

Ugh, this is going to be bad news since my room can go up to 90F degrees
during the heat waves since I live in a desert area.

If you don't o/c then not to worry.

Overall, it is the best system that I have ever made.
Oh, the mb has PS2 ports, IDE ports, and one PCI,

Crap, only one PCI slot? I have four PCI cards (three TV tuners + SB
Audigy 2 ZS). I guess I could sacrifice my old non-HD TV card and
soundcard, but I still have two left.

I mean PCI, not PCIe. That mb has 2 pcie 16 slots, 2 pcie 8 slots
and 2 pcie 1 slots.
It will be difficult to find a decent mb with PCI slots nowadays.
Don't know if they make them for quad core cpu's or not.
May have to get an old P4 board and cpu.

which the comparable ASUS did not have. Granted, those things
slow a machine down... but... Oh, no parallel port.

Bah to parallel which I don't have. I have no IDE devices in my current
quad-core system. All SATA drives now.

I had to get a PCI parallel card for my printer/fax/copier.
A usb to parallel will not work for 2 way com.

Why not buy a new printer/fax/copier instead or use it on another
computer that have parallel and network share?

I thought about that, but $13 for a parallel card was cheaper.
The other computers are not always on.