Upgrade Path

[McCool]

Hello,
I have a decent computer I built almost 4 years ago. It's a Core 2 Duo on a decent Gigabyte mobo, 8800GT, decent hard-drives and 4GB of 1066 Ballistix. I want to slowly upgrade this system to an i7 machine that will serve me well for another 4 years. I do a lot of programming, virtual machines, and a little gaming when I have time. I figure I'd start out by swapping out the mobo and cpu right off the bat, get about 16 GB of faster memory next month, video after that, then raid some SSDs after that. I hope to run 3 monitors at some point too. So, what would be my best mobo to go with an i7 2600k? I might dabble a bit with overclocking; I have a very nice case with LOTS of cooling.

 

[abekl]

Sounds like you'll need to do the memory at the same time as your MB because your memory is likely DDR2, which will not fit in newer MB's - you'll need DDR3.

 

[McCool]

Yes, I realize that now! I have about $800 to spend on CPU, Mobo, and Memory; maybe I'll buy half the memory up front and the other half later. I think my main question concerning P67 or Z68 is that it sounds like I don't need z68 if I plan on running SSD drives. I was wondering if this assumption is correct?