New Build

[Jordy]

Unfortunately I've reached the point where my current tower can no longer be relied upon and my tech knowledge is no where near as good as it was when it comes to speccing up a new build.

Essentially the demise of my current computer is down to having three monitors so my new tower needs to be able to comfortably handle three monitors. Atm I'm doing it with 2 outputs from the graphics card and one from the motherboard.

I don't game anymore or do anything out the ordinary when it comes to computing, I'm a heavy Chrome user and like lots of applications at once spread across monitors but nothing that demanding if that helps when speccing up.

I don't have a budget but I'm hoping a setup to meet my needs will be around £450, decent processor, 6GB RAM and an alright graphics card would be ideal

An OS or HDD does not need to be included.

Thanks very much for any help, I appreciate it a lot and I'll try hand out as much rep as possible.

[Recursion]

Is there anything else you could recycle like the case/optical drive? If you can recycle some bits and bobs I reckon you could get an i5 Sandybridge setup for £450 - £470. And 6GB isn't great, stick to either 4 or 8GB.

[Jordy]

'fraid not other than the HDD plus my current case is mATX. Can I see the i5 setup you have in mind with 4GBs :-)

[N!ck]

Have put an expensive motherboard in there so that if in future you decide you want a beastly over clocked system you have a motherboard that will handle these things. I have the same one.

Can save money on the graphics card and motherboard if this is too expensive. The ATi 5xxx series can handle 3 connected monitors and the 6xxx can handle 4. I put a mid range 6xxx in there in case you do decide to fire up a game and it has 2 x DVI ports which will be easier to connect any monitor to.

8 GB of RAM as it's pretty cheap these days.

The problem is going to be if all of your monitors connect via vga as it will be expensive to buy a display port -> vga adaptor.

[Jordy]

Have put an expensive motherboard in there so that if in future you decide you want a beastly over clocked system you have a motherboard that will handle these things. I have the same one.

Can save money on the graphics card and motherboard if this is too expensive. The ATi 5xxx series can handle 3 connected monitors and the 6xxx can handle 4. I put a mid range 6xxx in there in case you do decide to fire up a game and it has 2 x DVI ports which will be easier to connect any monitor to.

8 GB of RAM as it's pretty cheap these days.

The problem is going to be if all of your monitors connect via vga as it will be expensive to buy a display port -> vga adaptor.

Aha cheers that's very helpful and I like the look of the motherboard. Unfortunately my monitors are all VGA (quantity over quality!), could I achieve this through the mobo or maybe 2 graphics cards?

[N!ck]

Aha cheers that's very helpful and I like the look of the motherboard. Unfortunately my monitors are all VGA (quantity over quality!), could I achieve this through the mobo or maybe 2 graphics cards?

2 graphics cards yes. Mobo, no. You can do it with 3 vgasand one card though. You need two DVI -> VGA adapters and a display port -> VGA adapter (fairly expensive).

I don't think any modern graphics card will have any VGA ports.