Verno wrote on Dec 18, 2012, 09:39:

So I fired up the old desktop and took a look at what I actually had in it... Might be in better shape than I thought, though I think an SSD might be desireable after all the talk here and dealing with a lot of HD chugging as it was going through all the windows updates

Motherboard is a Gigabyte EX58-UD3R. So PCIe 2.0 for graphics, LGA1366 for CPU.
CPU is an i7 920, so I think it's actually in reasonable shape still.
Graphics is a Radeon HD 4850(pretty sure it's a 50 off memory... definitely was a relatively powerful card at time of purchase).
Have 6GB RAM, though not sure if it's 1066 or 1333 though. Looks like I still can upgrade here if I'd like.
HD is a 1TB drive, but pretty sure that it was a Caviar Green.

So I guess my main area to upgrade is the HD. Do SSD use a different controller than the standard IDE or SATA ports I have?

I would upgrade the videocard and the hard drive to an SSD, running Windows 7 on a 5400 RPM drive must be...interesting Everything else you can probably hold over until Haswell or whatever it's called.