Upgrading my PC and running 3 monitors, I am new and need help.

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bartekspitza

New Member
As the title states, I am looking to upgrade my PC. Worth noting is that I have little experience with building computers etc. These are my current specs:

i7 2600, 3.40GHz
Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 2GB
8GB Dual-Channel DDR3, 665MHz
Pegatron Corporation 2AB6
1863GB Hitachi HDS722020ALA330 (SATA)


I want to upgrade my processor to i7 6700k and graphic card to GTX 960 4GB, I also want to have 3 monitors in the future, can I have that with the GTX 460 and 960 running together? Is there anything in my current specs that interferes with what I want to upgrade with? Have I missed any information?

I appreciate all help I can get.
 
Should be able to do three monitors with the GTX 960. No need to run it with your old 460, not that you can anyway. How do your monitors connect? VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort?

You will need a new motherboard and new DDR4 RAM for the i7 6700K in case you didn't know.
 
spirit said:
Should be able to do three monitors with the GTX 960. No need to run it with your old 460, not that you can anyway. How do your monitors connect? VGA, DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort?

You will need a new motherboard and new DDR4 RAM for the i7 6700K in case you didn't know.
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No I didnt know that. Will there be any advantages using both cards instead of one?
Right now I plugged them in in the back of my PC so I guess its DVI and VGA, I will be getting 144hz screen so HDMI is not an option. Any motherboards and RAM that are priceworthy?
 
bartekspitza said:
No I didnt know that. Will there be any advantages using both cards instead of one?
Right now I plugged them in in the back of my PC so I guess its DVI and VGA, I will be getting 144hz screen so HDMI is not an option. Any motherboards and RAM that are priceworthy?
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You can't run them together - there's no drivers for that.

You'll need to get a VGA to DVI adapter if one of your monitors is VGA. Most cards these days only have one or two DVI outputs maybe one or two HDMI ports. You'll need to look at the 960s out there and see which suits you the best but I don't think any have 3 DVI ports. It looks to me like most 960s have one DVI port, 3 DisplayPort ports and an HDMI port. Some have 2 DVI ports but I haven't seen any with 3.

Motherboard and RAM wise any Gigabyte Z170 board on your budget would be fine and I'd get 16GB of RAM. As long as it's DDR4 it should be OK.
 
spirit said:
You can't run them together - there's no drivers for that.

You'll need to get a VGA to DVI adapter if one of your monitors is VGA. Most cards these days only have one or two DVI outputs maybe one or two HDMI ports. You'll need to look at the 960s out there and see which suits you the best but I don't think any have 3 DVI ports. It looks to me like most 960s have one DVI port, 3 DisplayPort ports and an HDMI port.

Motherboard and RAM wise any Gigabyte Z170 board on your budget would be fine and I'd get 16GB of RAM. As long as it's DDR4 it should be OK.
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Are you talking about running the GPU's together? I thought in some cases you needed to have 2 cards for 3 monitors.

Both my monitors can connest trough both VGA and DVI, however right now one is connected through VGA and the other through DVI. Are displayports as good as DVI/VGA?

Seems like quite a few changes has to be done, is it worth doing this or should I buy a new computer? I bought this computer 5 years ago and back then it was really good.. I have never upgraded anything.
 
bartekspitza said:
Are you talking about running the GPU's together? I thought in some cases you needed to have 2 cards for 3 monitors.

Both my monitors can connest trough both VGA and DVI, however right now one is connected through VGA and the other through DVI. Are displayports as good as DVI/VGA?

Seems like quite a few changes has to be done, is it worth doing this or should I buy a new computer? I bought this computer 5 years ago and back then it was really good.. I have never upgraded anything.
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You cannot run a GTX 460 and a 960 together in the same system. I don't think they will work together. If you wanted two cards you'd probably need two 960s.

Why do you feel the need to upgrade? An i7 2600 should still be plenty powerful enough for the majority of things. I'm using its successor, the 3770, which really isn't much faster than the 2600 and it's still handling everything I can throw at it. I can understand why you'd want a new GPU since the 460 is a bit old now and nowhere near as fast as a 960, but your CPU and board should still be fine. Maybe you could upgrade the RAM before DDR3 gets expensive. If you went with an i7 6700K you'd need a brand new board and RAM which is expensive.
 
In olden days, you needed a $60 adapter (unless you had native DisplayPort, which was rare) to run three monitors. Now pretty much any mid-high end supports 3-6 monitors natively.
You can in theory use the 960 for gaming and the 460 for PhysX, but it would only work in very few games, and it would just open up a whole new set of problems for normal day use. Would not recommend.
 
spirit said:
You cannot run a GTX 460 and a 960 together in the same system. I don't think they will work together. If you wanted two cards you'd probably need two 960s.

Why do you feel the need to upgrade? An i7 2600 should still be plenty powerful enough for the majority of things. I'm using its successor, the 3770, which really isn't much faster than the 2600 and it's still handling everything I can throw at it. I can understand why you'd want a new GPU since the 460 is a bit old now and nowhere near as fast as a 960, but your CPU and board should still be fine. Maybe you could upgrade the RAM before DDR3 gets expensive. If you went with an i7 6700K you'd need a brand new board and RAM which is expensive.
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Well I mainly want 3 screens, I guess getting 6700k and all that isn't necessary, I just thought that I might upgrade the processor while I'm at it, specially not that my computer is a little slow, but didn't know I need to replace the board and RAM aswell. Is only upgrading my GPU okey?
 
Jiniix said:
In olden days, you needed a $60 adapter (unless you had native DisplayPort, which was rare) to run three monitors. Now pretty much any mid-high end supports 3-6 monitors natively.
You can in theory use the 960 for gaming and the 460 for PhysX, but it would only work in very few games, and it would just open up a whole new set of problems for normal day use. Would not recommend.
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So I could run 3 monitors even now with my 460?
 
spirit said:
You cannot run a GTX 460 and a 960 together in the same system. I don't think they will work together. If you wanted two cards you'd probably need two 960s.

Why do you feel the need to upgrade? An i7 2600 should still be plenty powerful enough for the majority of things. I'm using its successor, the 3770, which really isn't much faster than the 2600 and it's still handling everything I can throw at it. I can understand why you'd want a new GPU since the 460 is a bit old now and nowhere near as fast as a 960, but your CPU and board should still be fine. Maybe you could upgrade the RAM before DDR3 gets expensive. If you went with an i7 6700K you'd need a brand new board and RAM which is expensive.
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If I decide to only upgrade the GPU (maybe RAM too) maybe I can buy a better GPU?
 
spirit said:
You cannot run a GTX 460 and a 960 together in the same system. I don't think they will work together.
Click to expand...

You can run them as separate adapters but you wouldn't be able to SLi or anything. It'd be a lot easier to just use the integrated iGPU for another display if needed though.
 
spirit said:
I'd just get the GPU.

Maybe an SSD too if you want, they're nice to have.
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Yeah I will probably just get GPU and RAM, maybe SDD. Can I get something like the GTX 970 4GB, is it compatible with my current setup? And as for RAM, will Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz 16GB CL9 also be compatible? Or can I somehow just buy 8GB and add to my current 8GB RAM?
 
bartekspitza said:
Yeah I will probably just get GPU and RAM, maybe SDD. Can I get something like the GTX 970 4GB, is it compatible with my current setup? And as for RAM, will Kingston DDR3 1333Mhz 16GB CL9 also be compatible? Or can I somehow just buy 8GB and add to my current 8GB RAM?
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I'd recommend 1600 or 1866MHz depending what motherboard you have.

Depending what sticks you have will depend on what you need to buy. CPU-Z will tell you what sticks you have: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

GTX 970 should be fine if it has the ports for your monitors.
 
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