New PC Component recommendations

Ok it's time for a new work PC. I have had this one for three years and there is only so much upgrading it will take.
This PC will be my main work PC but will also be my VM test bed. It will be running XP and Ubuntu.
I have a budget of £500 for components so I am looking for mother board recommendations etc.
I currently have a dual monitor setup and I am toying with the idea of a third monitor for a network status screen (nagios) although I dont know how well that will work and may just use a thin client with it's own TFT.
So Core2Duo or an AMD offering?
MotherBoard recommendations?
Will be using SATA drives.
Looking at 2 gig of ram.
May need 2 graphics cards.

If anyone has a good barebones system in mind as well I am all ears.

Cheers

ChrisH

It has to be a core 2 duo, I found the e6600 the best value

E6600 C2D Processor
Seagate Hard Drives (have 5 year warrantys on them if the go wrong) so they are great
2GB ram minimum

As your local to them why not pop and visit my friends at 3B Systems at the Technology Centre on Carr Road Nelson they have a nice range of goodies and are very supportive of education.

Or you just get one of the Core2Duo HP boxes that ICT Direct is getting in... warranty, HP build quality, etc., etc.

As said already Core 2 Duo E6750

P35 Chipset board with dual grpahics card slots (most will be a 16x & 4x PCI express dual slot config which is no problem if your using for an extra gfx card to get more displays) MSI/Asus/Abit/Intel/Gigabyte all pretty good

2GB Ram (cheap at the moment would be rude not to have at least 2GB)

500GB SATA HDD

SATA DVDRW

Didnt consider the slots for the GFX cards. So a PCI E and a PCI card would be in order your saying? Thanks for all the suggestions I will have a good look around tommorow.

Sorry I dont think I put that in the best way! Most mid range boards have two PCI Express graphics card slots that are x16 physically but you will often find the first one offers a full 16 pci express lanes while the second one will be something like 4 pci express lanes. (Which is fine for using an additional card for more outputs)

http://global.msi.com.tw/uploads/pro...1a4321f8ff.jpg

If you look at this board here it has two PCI Express graphics slots (physical x16), you will notice the second one is yellow to remind you it only has 4 pci express lanes available.

I believe recently somebody on here had multi monitor problems in vista when using cards that used different drivers.
I know we have had customers use a pair of low end nvidia cards to get four display outputs, something like 2x Geforce 7300LE or 2x Geforce 8600 etc.

Ah right I get you now. So they are not a full SLI capable board but have the two slots?

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Originally Posted by PeterW

2GB Ram (cheap at the moment would be rude not to have at least 2GB)

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I sure know about that Ram is going for monkeys nuts at present, got some 1GB sticks of DDR SO-DIMMS for £31 each the other day and they are Kingston at that rather than generic ram! It must be silly season (finishes working out how many sticks he needs to get all PCs onto 2gb ram :D)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by john

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PeterW

2GB Ram (cheap at the moment would be rude not to have at least 2GB)

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I sure know about that Ram is going for monkeys nuts at present, got some 1GB sticks of DDR SO-DIMMS for £31 each the other day and they are Kingston at that rather than generic ram! It must be silly season (finishes working out how many sticks he needs to get all PCs onto 2gb ram :D)

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Play.com are currently doing Kingston 1GB DDR2 sticks for £17.99. Ordered 2 for my home PC last night. Could turn out to be rubbish, but it's worth a try for £35.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ChrisH

Didnt consider the slots for the GFX cards. So a PCI E and a PCI card would be in order your saying? Thanks for all the suggestions I will have a good look around tommorow.

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No! Don't go that route... I found that whilst that works fine in Win2k and WinXP, it does not work for Vista.. Nobody has written drivers for the PCI graphics cards like the radeon 9250, 7000's.. and add to that you need to have cards that use the same graphics drivers (so even one ATI and one Nvidia is out).

So, if you want a third graphics port you have two options.. obtain one of the 1x PCI-E cards (USA source only) or get a motherboard with two 16x PCI-E slots... The only thing there is that as noted, there's the problem of many boards having one 16x slot and a reduced bus for the other or as I found with my board, both slots drop to 8x.. Something to double and triple check...

That offer of Kingston DDR2 1GB for £17.99 at Play.com is incredible!