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just wondering how m2 will run on windows 7 64-bit.... currently running 32-bit but I am considering upgrading. any issues with this?

No issues at all. I run 64-bit everywhere and going forward everyone really should.

ya i realize that's the way things are going... which is why i've decided to upgrade now. i've got such a weird build in the works lol... well, kind of weird. kind of a workstation geared towards gaming... i plan on building a better machine from scratch next spring, but this will be much better than what i've had for the last few years.

gigabyte 880gm-ud2h MoBo ... not great, but not terrible.
amd phenom II x4 965 ... on the way... big upgrade from my current Athlon II x2
nvidia quadro FX-1700 ---> got it for free... more for CAD, etc than gaming but huge step up from my integrated card
currently 4 gb of ram, but upgrading to 12
adding a 128 gb SSD probably, for booting OS and games
windows 7 ultimate 64-bit

on second thought... may sell my 2x2 gb ram and go with 8 (2x4) instead of varying ram... thoughts?

Looks like a nice machine! Yeah I'd recommend getting 2x4gb these days instead since RAM is cheap. Can then upgrade to 16gb down the road if you like. Like you mentioned, it's usually best to keep the ram dimms all the same size if possible.

Wait until Haswell comes out before building a new one.

I don't think he necessarily is going for the super-high end/new, and as nice as it is Haswell isn't out for a little while yet.

I should also note you can save a few bucks by going with Win7 x64 Home Premium instead of Ultimate. The only useful thing in Pro for non-business IMHO is remote desktop server (i.e. you can remote desktop *to* a machine running Pro) and Ultimate has a very small delta beyond that. Thus if you're buying the OS, just stick with Home Premium IMHO.

buy? who BUYS software these days?!

Anyways, got everything installed yesterday I decided against the SSD for now... more of a want vs a need.

My WEI scores are all pretty good... lowest is 4.9 for gaming graphics... which isn't really that bad considering all I play is Myth and a Quake 3 mod called Urban Terror... nothing that graphics heavy. And like I mentioned... the graphics card is geared toward CAD and 2d/3d graphics processing rather than gaming. All the other scores were like 7-7.6.

So ya... all in all I didn't spend very much. Graphics card was free... $110 for the Phenom II, $50 for the RAM, and a few bucks for some thermal grease. HUGE performance gains with these hardware upgrades + win7 64-bit upgrade. Very happy with it so far.

Ha, well I don't find the OEM versions of windows too bad, but to each his own

Good to hear it's all up and running - you can definitely crank up Myth 2 on that thing If you use DirectX 10/11 rendering you can enable MSAA in the poweruser.txt file as well which will improve model edges slightly as well. 1.8 improves stuff further when it comes out and will run very well on that system.

I was talking about the new computer he was building next year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_ ... ison_chart
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8_editions

There are some advantages to Win7 Pro but I don't think many people would need Ultimate. Almost everybody hates Win8 so this program is going to become popular

Always buy a good PSU. Most PSUs are noisy, electrically inefficient, failure prone and can take out the computer when they die. Look for something that has either Gold, Platinum or Titanium 80 Plus certification and a temperature controlled fan, and is preferably modular and semi-passive.

It's also really important to make good, informed choices with hard drives. The days when a hard drive is a hard drive are long over and the difference in performance, noise and reliability between models is significant. Don't buy online because being banged around by couriers will damage your HDD and may cause problems years later. Multiplatter drives are often more likely to fail than monoplatter drives.

A big but not yet well known issue is with current generation HDDs is head parking. Nearly all drives on the market now park their heads after a certain length of inactivity, that length depends on the model and firmware revision. That time can be 6s, 8s, 10s, 12s, 20s, 30s or 120s depending on the model but generally the Western Digitals are far more aggressive than the Seagates. Drives are chalking up millions of load / unload cycles per year so you can see what this might do in the long term. There are positives to head parking if your drive is physically hit or turned off while active but the default settings are often too aggressive.
With most Western Digitals you can use Widdle3.exe to change the time to something more reasonable like 60 seconds and with Seagates at least consder updating the firmware and look at disabling drive APM if it is a problem after that.

http://forums.seagate.com/t5/Barracuda- ... d-p/153389
https://koitsu.wordpress.com/2012/05/30 ... d-parking/
http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critica ... -hdds.html