Office PC Build Help - Budget £200

[caliston]

Depends how much you value your time, but eBuyer often have 'value' systems. This one is just a smidgen under £200 ex VAT:
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/218928

Buy ten, job done. Saves having to faff around building something, and the spec you get isn't a lot worse than building your own.

Though the graphics support isn't clear - you might need to check the reviews.

[DanceswithUnix]

Just a note from a Fedora Linux development user here.

I paid for an Nvidia graphics card out of my own wallet for a work PC just to avoid using the Intel integrated graphics drivers for Linux. Not a single annoying reboot/lock-up of the machine since I switched, used to get them frequently.

Used to use a 6200 64MB card which worked OK with dual head support, but now using a 9600GT which allows me to turn on the 3d compositing effects which were too much for the ancient 6200. I expect the 8400 is a good call, cheapest Nvidia card atm and might even allow the fun desktop effects

I would direct a mild whinge at your managers for Centos though, I found I had to hunt down and build from source all sorts of things that are just a "yum install" under Fedora. OK I have to re-install every 18 months to remain supported, but I save enough time to make up for that.

[scaryjim]

... have dual monitor support.

A geforce motherboard will do that for you as long as you want 1 DVI and 1VGA, but the DVI on motherboards is generally DVI-D so can't be converted to VGA with an adaptor. Similarly, if you go for the 8400GS (a good card, I've got one in my non-gaming PC) and you want to use 2 DVI monitors beware that you'll need an HDMI - DVI adapter: I can't remember the last time I saw an 8400GS with 2x DVI....

[tino]

A geforce motherboard will do that for you as long as you want 1 DVI and 1VGA, but the DVI on motherboards is generally DVI-D so can't be converted to VGA with an adaptor. Similarly, if you go for the 8400GS (a good card, I've got one in my non-gaming PC) and you want to use 2 DVI monitors beware that you'll need an HDMI - DVI adapter: I can't remember the last time I saw an 8400GS with 2x DVI....

I couldn't find any Nvidia one's that offered that. Unless I have missed a chipset revision in my search. If you have any suggestions I'm open to them! Otherwise I think the 8400GS is a reasonable alternative.

I would direct a mild whinge at your managers for Centos though, I found I had to hunt down and build from source all sorts of things that are just a "yum install" under Fedora. OK I have to re-install every 18 months to remain supported, but I save enough time to make up for that.

I have trust me, I come from an Debian environment primarily at home...but they want us to use CentOS as thats what run's on their servers. I guess it kind of makes sense that logic