Dual Monitor Setup for Work and Play

[byoung218]

I searched, but nothing recent and relevant came up.

I need a new desktop for my home office. The only REAL requirements aew that it MUST have dual monitor capabilities (which I assume is fairly common) and run Windows. I'd like to be able to stream video and play casual games, but nothing hardcore. I don't need a crazy system, but I'd like to be able to do everything well and have the option to upgrade components later on.

I would very much prefer a prebuilt system in the $600 range (not including monitors obviously). I have some ability to upgrade parts, but I don't really want to build an entire system from scratch if I can avoid it.

Thank you in advance for your help!!

 

[obsama1]

You're not going to get a pre-built system for $600 that supports dual-monitors without upgrading the PSU and GPU. Better to build your own, in my opinion.

 

[byoung218]

You're not going to get a pre-built system for $600 that supports dual-monitors without upgrading the PSU and GPU. Better to build your own, in my opinion.

In that case, what would you suggest?

 

[byoung218]

I just played around and built this system from CyberPower. Total came to around $740. Any thoughts?

Case: Thermaltake Commander Mid-Tower Gaming Case [-12] (Black Color)

CPU: Intel® Core™ i3-2120 3.30 GHz 3M Intel Smart Cache LGA1155

Motherboard: * [CrossFireX] GIGABYTE GA-Z77-D3H Intel Z77 Chipset DDR3 ATX Mainboard w/ IRST, Lucid Virtu MVP, Ultra Durable4 Classic, 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, 2x Gen3 PCIe x16, 3x PCIe x1 & 2 PCI (Extreme OC Certified) [+36]

Freebies: GIGABYTE GC-WB300D Exclusive Bluetooth 4.0/WiFi PCIe Expansion Card

Memory: 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory [+43] (Patriot Viper 3 Intel Extreme Masters Edition)

Video Card: AMD Radeon HD 6450 1GB 16X PCIe Video Card [+38] (Major Brand Powered by AMD)

Power Supply Upgrade: 700 Watts - Standard Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX

Hard Drive: 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200 RPM HDD [+5] (Single Drive)
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows 7 Home Premium [+104] (64-bit Edition)

 

[nyterage]

building one with dual monitor capabilitys on the cheep you would probably want to go with a AMD APU and run it in dual graphics mode, 6gb of ram, 500gb hard drive, probably wouldnt come up to more than 700

doing a bit of shopping led me to this

Combo with Case, PSU, CPU, RAM, Motherboard and SSD here
GPU, 2gb of vram for the higher resolution of dual monitors here
750gb hard drive for storage space here

totals out to 594.88 after shipping costs and will handle everything you mentioned with ease.

or you could go prebuilt, here is a good deal, HP Pavilion p7-1240 (H2L70AA#ABA) Desktop PC A10-Series APU A10-5700(3.4GHz) 10GB DDR3 1TB HDD Capacity AMD Radeon HD 7660D Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
and add a Radeon 6670 for dual graphics, here $70

totals out to 676.96 after shipping

 

[obsama1]

Has duak-monitor capabilities, but you can build one for $700 that's 1.5x more powerful.