My sister is a poor college student and plays WoW occasionally off of gift cards...her antiquated laptop barely runs Windows, let alone anything else. She doesn't have much ($200 tops) at the moment but can save up if necessary.

Unfortunately I didn't know about this a while ago, since I have a habit of keeping old stuff around for a year before I finally get rid of it...and now it's gone, so I don't have anything to build with anymore.

I found a guy on Anandtech who'll sell a Pentium D system with a 3870, but I thought I'd check here too -- if modern integrated video can handle WoW, I'd consider building something for her too. I have a couple spare licenses (XP and 7).

I am way out of touch on what modern hardware is doing and how much it costs, but I have seen 4Gb of DDR3 for $27 after rebate, so I know RAM has gone back to a reasonable level. If I can get a case/PS for $50, RAM at $30, motherboard/CPU at $120, I can scrounge up a hard drive for her somewhere. Any thoughts?

Modern non-intel GPUs will actually play WoW quite well on lower settings. Intel GPUs can play it too, but very poorly. WoW runs on a lot of crap.

I have 7 year old computer that runs WOW fine, but its not for sale. Its my baby.

I don't have a whole system, but I have an 8800GT and DDR2 ram for sale.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138283

What about that?

Biostar is awful. I would rather not have a machine than use Biostar. Cheap unreliable pieces of crap, and terrible support to boot.

Your sister is legal and plays videogames, you say?



...and her e-mail is...?

Hahah...she's taken and her boyfriend is some upper level black belt in some form of kickassery.

Asus or gigabyte or get out.

3870 agp isn't a bad card for what it is. It would have no problem playing WoW maybe even on full settings depending on res

Build me a system for $200, then.

yeah well i'm a master of the ancient martial art of ".45 and a shovel"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128424
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103688&cm_re=amd-_-19-103-688-_-Product
Re-Use that 4890. Find some cheap ass DDR2 local on on newegg, same with hard drive.

Case? Power supply? Optical drive? $90 out of my pocket for the 4890?

That is a cheap board, though.

Good point, I'm too used to re-using everything. The board is good and not made by a no-name though.

Unfortunately I dont have a whole system to give out right now but I could probably donate a low-end PCI-E GPU and/or 450-500w PSU.

How much is that Pentium D system your considering?

Newegg apparently doesn't have any boards with good integrated chipsets for a decent price. It's actually almost cheaper to get a dedicated card and a non-integrated mobo. I got up to $183 with a passable system, but wasn't able to fit a case and PSU into that.

Don't forget to look through craigslist

He hasn't given me a price yet - he said he'd give me the the case, mobo, psu and dvd-rw for free if I pay the going rate for the cpu, memory, hdd and video card. I'm not sure what that's worth (Optiplex GX620 with Pentium D 930, 1Gb RAM).

craigslist.

Sounds like a rip off

Worth damn near nothing, seriously the TV station I intern at is giving them away to anyone who donates anything to a charity. Tell him going price for all that is like, 20 dollars. Which is true.

just to point out... the sys requirements have gone up for WoW recently, so make sure you take that into account. (that said, I know very little about computer hardware these days, so I couldn't tell you if the stuff mentioned in this thread is good for it)

Right now I am leaning towards telling her to save up a bit more and I can build her an AMD system from the ground up. It'll last a lot longer and won't be a turd.