Intel Core i5 2400 or AMD FX-4100 or better NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470, ATI Radeon HD 5870 or better new case, harddrive, fans, motherboard, and basically anything else needed to build a computer, but the minimum I am looking for are the parts listed above http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/14580888055
I hate to be "that guy", but the best advice I can give you is save a couple hundred more $ up. IMHO its wasting money to build a comp that low spec, when for a couple hundred more you can double your performance. The trick with computer building is finding the balance between cost and performance. Usually I find the best value per dollar to be around 900-ish for a complete system (without monitor). Can be a bit cheaper if you can reuse things from your previous comp. Or get used stuff, which I've always been scared to do, since you never know how it's been treated.
start with the core, MB, ram, processor, power supply. You should be more than capable of using just about everything else from your existing PC until you can afford to upgrade, and unless they go through another huge architecture changes you should be safe for a while. graphics cards are difficult to get quality cheap, the best I can offer is wait until the last 'great' video card becomes the second tier or clearance and get it if you can afford it, otherwise just go for what you can afford to get. If you really -have- to stay within Y budget get a high end MB a decent processor, matched ram that meets your minimum requirements and the rest should go to your video card, make sure you have a power supply with enough juice for your 'ideal' computer and a case that can handle the whole thing but really, you can get a generic 'will hold your computer' case for a fairly reasonable price, it just won't look awesome and may have heat issues, but really worst case scenario is you pull the sides off the case and run it open.
Just, sometimes saving a little more is simply not an option. I personally know that all too well, when it's difficult to get any budget together at all.
I also can't scrap another computer for parts, due to the fact I have children and they were promised the hand me down. Whats more important, 3.0 ghz cpu, or the graphics card? Intel Core i5 2400 or AMD FX-4100 or better NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470, ATI Radeon HD 5870 or better
it really depends, the cpu is almost always more important in the long run, but the graphics card is specifically more important for high graphics driven games and videos, also a lot of those same games and videos redirect a lot of their processing requirements to the GPU. That said, it's a whole shit tons easier to swap out a graphics card than it is to change the processor once you've got it built, not to mention far less likely to end up costing you money if you should just happen to zap the processor with static electricity in just the -right- (read, electrical meltdown) way. GPU's tend to have a lot more grounding surface to protect the onboard processor. Honestly though, the clock speed of the processor isn't as big a deal as it has been in the past, I'd argue that the future is processor cores, you can do a whole lot more with 4 cores running at 500 mhz than you can with a single core running at 2k simply by having intelligent data parsing. What do you think it is that made the 'super computers' so super?
Filling my 'be a prick' quota for the day. 1 MHz * 1000 -> 1 GHz. You wrote MHz * 1000 = k. (yes I know it's a whoopsie and you meant 2k MHz but it's early in the morning and now I can be a reasonable human being for rest of the day. I'm so very sorry)
it's not a whoopsie, it's a, I'm reading this as a prick so I'm not going to recognize that the use of 2k is to represent two thousand, not two khz, whereby the previously mentioned 'mhz' would be redundant if applied to this numeral as well. which is fine, I'm merely pointing out that I was not incorrect in my statement, it is simply possible to be read incorrectly. You're starting to sound like a Canadian with all the apologies
