It's my own fault for not looking into it enough, but since I'm not really knowledgeable about these things and it was the first time I built a computer I just assumed that any motherboard in the £80 range would have somewhere for me to plug in my monitor...
I was obviously wrong, and while I'm very curious as to why Gigabyte considered serial and parallel ports more important than VGA, what's done is done and I need to decide how to work around it. As far as I can see I have the following options:
1) Try to sell my (new) monitor, and buy a different one with HDMI. Loss of about £100
2) Buy a graphics card with a VGA port. Loss of about £20 directly, plus a waste of my i5 2500k's onboard graphics and the extra cost of the motherboard that can access them.
3) Some kind of HDMI--->VGA converter? From what I've read this isn't very easy.
4) Any other ideas?
With 2), if I got a graphics card which was weaker than the i5's onboard graphics, would it still take over and turn off the onboard graphics? So in other words do I have to buy a graphics card of a certain minimum quality to avoid essentially paying to downgrade my system's graphics performance??
By the way I just have a generic/unbranded "500W" PSU which may or may not even handle a graphics card. I wasn't planning on getting one.
Thanks for any suggestions,