Advice building a Win7 box

[Iterate]

1. There's an 80% chance the problem with your old PC is just the power supply.

You didn't mention the cause if you found it, but I was just looking at the other thread and that was the first thing that came to mind. The other thing that would likely cause a BIOS boot freeze would be a system board or CPU fail, but since you consistently get to the BIOS screen, those are less likely. Besides, they take longer to fail completely and in an obvious way than does a PS problem.

That Gigabyte board was well made with polymer caps (in reaction to the mass capacitor failures just before it was designed). Still, bad board voltage regulation can't be ruled out.

So...by picking up a new, energy efficient PS you can either test it with (and maybe salvage) your old system or have it as the first piece for your new one. Unless you recap the old PS and replace its fan, it may not last much longer. That's not hard to do though.

I'm mentioning it because I'm somewhat in the same boat right now -I use a small, energy efficient (25w) PC for casual use and a much older P4 that was for heavy lifting. It's the P4 that I'm about to upgrade.

Wattage matters most to me, so I've been looking at the Haswell i5 4670T. Not sure yet about that. But I already have the PS. Excess memory doesn't boost wattage that much, and you might not need a separate graphics card.

Obviously I don't like discarding old systems.