Buying new PC - what hardware won't allow Windows 7?

I'll soon be buying a new PC and while I'll be considering other operating systems, I do want to make sure I have the option of installing Windows 7, which I love.

Does anyone know:

1. Which items of hardware (eg motherborad, GPU) have the ability to prevent Windows 7 being installed?
2. Within those categories, do the majority still support Win 7, or is it now the minority?
3. Is there a list/guide anywhere to what specs I'd need to look for?

Thanks for your reply, SIW2. Everything you said seems to be based around the idea of avoiding a graphics card. Am I to infer that modern graphics cards are one of the biggest barriers to using Windows 7?

For me, a graphics card is absolutely essential as I do a huge amount of video production, editing, and high-end special effects with software like Adobe After Effects. (I have about a dozen different YouTube channels planned for the future.) So I absolutely need powerful graphics capabilities.

For the record, I don't want Wi-Fi, or a built-in modem. I use ethernet to get online.

Not sure that you need a 'new' retail PC for what you want to do. If you're on a tight budget then an older Intel Xeon 'workhorse' workstation PC from HP, with a large SDD and plenty of RAM, should be fine for video production at 720px for YouTube channels. Even a well-specced old HP Z800, for instance. Look on eBay. Built like a tank and highly reliable.You may be limited to Photoshop CC 2018 and Adobe After Effects 2015. Both perfectly adequate. Though AE 2018 is also said to be able to work if certain Windows updates are present(?).I think the highest you can go with graphics cards would be an NVIDIA 3090 Ti 12Gb. As far as I know, the NVIDIA 40 series cards are not supported by drivers for Windows 7.If you want to do locally-generated AI Stable Diffusion images for your YouTube channels, you can use the free InvokeAI 3.0.0 with a small workaround (replace a .DLL) for Windows 7. The standalone installer is on the Internet Archive. Otherwise you'll be reliant on online services.

Yeah i agree with above you don't need the newest tech to edit videos. Further when you are talking about pairing with windows 7 as you will get worse parity to that new hardware and in some cases no driver or broken driver support.

As long as the card can do Nvenc then its good enough. So around GTX 7x cards on wards.

Some editing software out there are bad on older hardware because the actual software is just bad but there is actually a few that will work on old hardware no problem. Vegas pro is one that can work on really slow computers and produce rendering times that are fast so it means that any old computer is good for editing.

I would say around 6th gen going back as far as about 4th gen you going to get the sweet spot of compatibility for windows 7 while buying used parts that are cheap or cheeper, while also having parts that are still fast and can crunch stuff like video editing fast if you get the right parts.

Thanks so much guys, great advice. I appreciate that you're saying I don't need the latest tech.

However, I do want to use the latest and best video codecs used by my cameras (HEVC, AV1, or even VP9), which I believe are supported natively by modern GPUs (or APUs). That's why I'm leaning towards the newer systems - to keep seek time as fast as possible.

By the way, I use Adobe After Effects exclusively to edit videos (I can get After Effects 2019 running on Windows 7). I'm also working with 4K video (typically edited down to 1080p, but still working with 4K footage). Oh and unusually for me, my budget isn't too tight this time!

Yes which is why i said Nvenc compatibility as that is HEVC on the GPU, you cannot beat Nvenc because graphics cards are way faster than CPU which CPU is HEVC and slower.

Literally you can slap in a 10 year old GPU and do video editing the Motherboard and all that other stuff does not really matter as long as its got Sata 3.

6th gen / Skylake so since around then you got all sorts of computers you can make for cheap you can go back way older than that even.
Why recommend older parts? Because you probably not going to get the best support for a modern system on windows 7. If you really want a modern PC then you would need to use windows 10 imo.
6th gen is probably the newest parts i would recommend comfortably past that gen support for 7 starts tapering off. Where 6th gen is still plenty fast for video editing slap the right GPU in and you got plenty of power for video editing.

Thanks so much, Malneb!