Hi, I'm an equities & futures trader and located in Dubai, UAE - for the past several years I've had a simple core2duo pc with dual monitors and it worked beautifully till last week (when the whole thing got wrecked in a moving accident,sadly). The only work I had to do on it, in all the time I owned it was to increase the ram once from 2gb to 3gb last year - and this suited me fine because I am not very computer savvy...so now I'm looking to build a new pc. My usage needs are simple - no real gaming (at the most, some times I play a little counterstrike: source and that runs great even on my crap laptop so it shouldn't be a prob) - browsing and some hd movies from time to time - most importantly, stock trading with multiple charting packages and data streams running concurrently I'm looking for a simple enough setup but I want to have 3 monitors this time - from what I understand, AMD's Eyefinity is the way to go - Price is not really an issue but I don't want to spend like $2-3k because my needs aren't that heavy. Right now I only have a keyboard and mouse left so I'm looking for an entire build - CPU, casing, MoBo, power supply, hdd, optical drive, RAM, graphics card, win7 64bit and 3 monitors, atleast 22" each The rep at the local computer mart gave me the following specs PROCESSOR : INTEL CORE i5 650 3.20Ghz (4MB CACHE - 2.5 GT/s - 32nm) MOTHERBOARD : ASUS P7H55-V P55 2200FSB O.C (LGA1156) MEMORY : CORSAIR 8gb 1333mhz HARD DRIVE : 500GB 3.5" SATA-II 7200RPM OPTICAL DRIVE : SAMSUNG DVDRW 22X SATA GRAPHIC CARD : ATi FirePro V4800 1GB GDDR5 CHASSIS : COOLER MASTER CHASSIS GLADIATOR 600 WITH 600W PSU O/S: Win 7 home prem. 64bit Monitors: DELL P2210h x3 Price Total = US$ 1350 - includes all cabling and installation Now, to my questions: 1) Is this setup overkill for my needs, especially the firepro card and 600W psu? (The comp store guy said the firepro card will serve all 3 monitors, run eyefinity for me and firepro drivers etc are hassle free and stable, much more so than radeon) 2) Do I need to add a cpu cooler or something - don't cpu's and graphics cards already come with coolers/fans? 3) I came across this motherboard when googling - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=3443#sp it has dvi, hdmi and displayport on it with the following 'notes' on its spec page (Note 2) To use the onboard DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI-D, and D-Sub ports, you must install an Intel CPU with integrated graphics. (Note 3) The DVI-D port does not support D-Sub connection by adapter. (Note 4) You can use only one of the onboard digital graphics ports (e.g. DisplayPort, HDMI, and DVI-D) for output when in the BIOS Setup program or when during the POST screens. so presumably it will run my 3 monitor setup and I don't have to get a graphics card at all then - or am i missing something very basic here? :-s I'd appreciate any help answering these questions and/or suggesting changes to the build given above as per my requirements - Thanks
