Well, I do mean to upgrade the hard drives to SATA when I get the money - 250 GB used to be pretty awesome way back when I got them, but video editing can really make it seem pretty small pretty quickly.

I was basing my judgement of the 1156 on a number of threads I skimmed on tomshardware where this point was being dicussed. Since the 920 and 860 both run on 1366, though, it makes the point moot in this case. If you only hadn't written:

>> 1366 is a waste of money unless you're planning to run six sticks of RAM. Go with 1156.

Wouldn't I also be losing four cores as i5 doesn't have HT? I'm considering expanding RAM to 8GB in the future, but six sticks is a bit of an overkill for my current needs.

At this point 860 seems like a pretty solid choice TBH.

After reading up on dual vs triple channel memory, this conclusion kinda defies your statement that "triple channel is ineffective", Promit.

freeworld - cheers for the pointers on the tower. Tower prices scale quite a lot and I was actually hoping to get away with something a bit cheaper than the 900, but I do want to make it as quiet as possible and as cool as possible with stock cooling.

As mentioned, I don't intend to build a gaming rig so SLI is not something I want or need.

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After reading up on dual vs triple channel memory, this conclusion kinda defies your statement that "triple channel is ineffective", Promit.

No, they don't disagree at all; they say it's a logical direction to head in but that in the real world you see basically no difference going from one to the other.

Once we swap over to fast DDR5 RAM and have chips with on-chip vector co-processors then triple-channel will really show a difference. But right now, on the chips you are aimming for, triple channel allows you to go to a larger capacity and thats really about it.

I recently bought a Xeon X3440 and I'm extremely happy with it. It's an 1156 chip and it's pretty much equivalent to the i7 860. It has hyperthreading too. It's much cheaper though (or at least it was when I got it with the deals I found), mostly because it's clocked at 2.53GHz which is less than the 860. However, they both overclock very well. I have my X3440 running at 4.0GHz with hyperthreading, using an inexpensive air cooler (Scythe Mugen 2). The CPU cost me $220 Canadian which was something like $100 less than the 860 would have. Although it runs hot at 100% load, idle and normal use sits in the low 30's Celsius with low power draw.

I'm running the Gigabyte P55A-UD3P motherboard. It's reasonably cheap, works great, overclocks great and hasn't given me any trouble at all. For the case, I'm using the Coolermaster RC690 which is a bigger mid-tower case and I like it a lot.

Power supply requirements vary a lot depending on overclocking. The Xeon's TDP is something like 125-135W but it can use over double that when overclocked a lot (at full load). That said, I'm not sure what's really required, but 600W should certainly be enough at 4GHz, and 500W could possibly be enough too, depending on the video card.

I would highly recommend an (overclocked) Xeon. There's no strings attached - it should work in any rig that could house an 1156 i7.

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Since I can't seem to find a really good resource on towers, I'm wondering if I should save up for a full tower or would a miditower do?

A mid-tower is fine. I'm using this case. I've generally been happy with their products.

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- will a 500W PSU cut it or should I go for something like 550 or 600?

I'm using a 550 Watt PSU with my current i7-920 with no problems. 500 is probably OK as well. Anything above that for when you're playing the "How many GPUs can I stick in my PC" game.

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- my current hard drives are IDE drives, but I'd like to add a pair of SATA drives later on. Will I need to consider something when mixing them? Would it make a massive difference (speed-wise) if the boot drive was an IDE drive rather than a SATA one?

Erm, exactly how big are the IDE drives? You can get fairly size-able SATA drives for dirt-cheap, and they will likely be a good upgrade over your IDE drives.

You can mix IDE and SATA fairly well. I've done so on my wife's computer to salvage her old data. However, I'd recommend you toss the IDE drives and upgrade to SATA. $50 can buy you a 320 GB hard drive.

As someone with an 1366, I'd say listen to the advice and seriously look into a 1156. The 1156 will suite your needs just fine. Personally, I only have a 1366 because I got a half-off deal from a family member working at Intel.

Eidt:

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Do you guys mean that cooling would be an issue? I've read some stuff about the 9xx series hitting almost 100C with stock cooling.

I haven't seen anywhere near that, but I also haven't pushed my computer to 100%. I've only ever maxed out a few of the cores at any one time.

As the article points out, the price difference between the i7-860 and i7-920 isn't the cost of the CPU so much as the cost of the motherboard. You don't want to pay for features you aren't going to use, and if you opt for the 1366 mobo, then you're going to be paying for features you aren't using.