Advice for a new low-cost PC

[lorenzo.licari]

Hello, I need your kind advice.

First of all a little premise: I and my mother both love playing World
of Warcraft, and now she decided to buy a new computer so we do not
need to share the time to play. So she needs a new computer only to
play wow, and nothing else, apart maybe from some excel sheets every
once in a while.
Given this limited task, the computer should be as cheap as possibile,
but granting anyway a decent quality of gaming (luckily wow is not
Doom!).

So my question is if according to you the following specs would do for
me.

AMD Sempron 3300+
RAM 512MB
HD Seagate barracuda 80GB SATA
Asus K8VX-SE
Ati Radeon 9600pro (128MB AGP)

I can get all that plus floppy, 17 lcd monitor, dvd-rom... for about
650-700 Euros. For around 800-850 I could get a better pc, but maybe
all that performance would not be used, after all.
Maybe a better graphics card is needed? The shop has a radeon X700 AGP
128MB, but that costs twice as the old glorious 9600pro (120 euros vs
70 euros), and I'm not sure it is worth that money.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Lorenzo

PS: I have successfully installed Wow on a 500Mhz Pentium, with 330 MB
of RAM, 15GB HD and 9200se graphics card, and it works great, not
considering those few initial seconds when it has to load everything
into memory.

 

[tim.rax]

Hey,

I saw this pc on ebay.co.uk yesterday:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8775934611&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MESE:IT&rd=1

Pretty good deal, send a message to see if they will post outside of
the UK for you, im sure they will.

Hope this helps.

 

[Dave]

Hello, I need your kind advice.

First of all a little premise: I and my mother both love playing World
of Warcraft, and now she decided to buy a new computer so we do not
need to share the time to play. So she needs a new computer only to
play wow, and nothing else, apart maybe from some excel sheets every
once in a while.
Given this limited task, the computer should be as cheap as possibile,
but granting anyway a decent quality of gaming (luckily wow is not
Doom!).

So my question is if according to you the following specs would do for
me.

AMD Sempron 3300+
RAM 512MB
HD Seagate barracuda 80GB SATA
Asus K8VX-SE
Ati Radeon 9600pro (128MB AGP)

I can get all that plus floppy, 17 lcd monitor, dvd-rom... for about
650-700 Euros. For around 800-850 I could get a better pc, but maybe
all that performance would not be used, after all.
Maybe a better graphics card is needed? The shop has a radeon X700 AGP
128MB, but that costs twice as the old glorious 9600pro (120 euros vs
70 euros), and I'm not sure it is worth that money.

Thank you in advance for your help.
Lorenzo

PS: I have successfully installed Wow on a 500Mhz Pentium, with 330 MB
of RAM, 15GB HD and 9200se graphics card, and it works great, not
considering those few initial seconds when it has to load everything
into memory.

Well, everything looks great for playing world of warcraft. There is only
one change I would make, and if you are a careful shopper, it might not even
cost you any extra money. I personally would not build a computer without a
burner of some kind, preferably a DVD burner. But you can substitute a
"combo" drive with CDR/W capability and DVD-Rom capability for about the
same cost as an ordinary DVD-Rom drive. I'm thinking of the future more
than the present. It would be somewhat unlikely that you'd never want the
ability to burn optical disks of some type, ever, in that system. I know my
nephew's save game files, for example, are too large to fit on floppy disks.
I filled several DVD blanks with those alone, when his hard drive got
infested with computer viruses. Without a DVD burner? Man, I would have
had to pull his hard drive out and mount it on another system. Not
un. -Dave

 

[adsci]

hi lorenzo!

maybe we both have another vision of WoW running great, but i recently
bought a new computer for WoW also since my old:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
1GB Ram
Sapphire 9600XT Stock-Overclocked 128MB
on MSI KT4V Board

was too slow.
I had 5-15 FPS in Ironforge and on 20+ Raids like Zul'Gurub my Computer
was at its limits for fun gameplay (nevertheless it ran basically good
enough to HAVE some fun).

i really dont wanna know what wow on that 500Mhz machine is alike.

My new computer is just as fast in WoW as i never dreamed of. I never
experienced framerates beneath 40fps - not even in Ironforge at
rushhours (AMD Athlon 64 4000+, 1 GB Ram, eVGA 7800 GT CO, DFI UT
LanParty Ultra-D Board). In Normal Situations the FPS is around 80-100.

My Advice:

AMD Sempron 3300+

I think this is good. Nevertheless WoW really needs CPU Power.

RAM 512MB

This is not enough. in my experience RAM is the most important factor
for WoW. on 1GB Ram WoW uses around 700-800MB when fully loaded
(inclusive OS)

HD Seagate barracuda 80GB SATA

yes, its ok. if you really want only wow on that machine you maybe can
save money here.

Asus K8VX-SE

no comment, since i dont know whether there are problems with this board
or not. just take a cheap one from MSI, Asus or DFI.

Ati Radeon 9600pro (128MB AGP)

Good one i think. i think there is some benefit of a faster card, but if
you cannot afford it take this. on my 2000+ rig i think my cpu was the
bottleneck.

as of my experience WoW needs this components very much in this order:
RAM->CPU->GRAPHICSCARD

So i would put the most in RAM, much in CPU and the Rest in graphics.
Everything else as cheap as possible.

Please ensure you get a quality PSU too, since this can save you much
nerves. My tip: Enermax or Antec PSU... for this rig 350 or 400 Watts.

regards
marcel

 

[adsci]

Well, everything looks great for playing world of warcraft. There is only
one change I would make, and if you are a careful shopper, it might not even
cost you any extra money. I personally would not build a computer without a
burner of some kind, preferably a DVD burner. But you can substitute a
"combo" drive with CDR/W capability and DVD-Rom capability for about the
same cost as an ordinary DVD-Rom drive. I'm thinking of the future more
than the present. It would be somewhat unlikely that you'd never want the
ability to burn optical disks of some type, ever, in that system. I know my
nephew's save game files, for example, are too large to fit on floppy disks.
I filled several DVD blanks with those alone, when his hard drive got
infested with computer viruses. Without a DVD burner? Man, I would have
had to pull his hard drive out and mount it on another system. Not
un. -Dave

my last build dont have a dvd burner.
why?

- theres my notebook which burns dvds.
- there is my linux machine which burns cds.
- there is my second pc which burns dvds.
- there is this nifty router which connects all those computers together
and i always can put files from to another and can burn them.

the only benefit i had by putting another burner into that machine would
be having a burning option on that computer even when its network broke
and everything else still works. and in this unlikely situation i'll put
a burner in or the HD out.

the positive aspect of that is that i dont need to install any burning
software and any PC Games which uses nasty copy protections would not
find any burner, any copy-related-software and will be very happy about
that

 

[lorenzo.licari]

First of all I want to thank you all.
As regards dvd/cd burner, I am in the situation described by adsci,
that's to say i have a little lan and other computers with dvd burner,
but i'll take into account to buy one.
As for RAM I think Marcel is right, i'll take 1GB. Of course when i say
that wow is running great on a 500mhz i mean that i get 20-25 fps, and
that's great indeed for that machine, far better than what i get in my
laptop (i can have fun even in dungeons). As i said we are not fanatics
of graphics, and 30-40 fps are enough for us.
The last doubt is about the graphics card: i had a look around, and for
120 euros i can have a 6600gt 128mb PCI-E instead of x700. That is
still within the budget, and i it would be great, but would it not be
cpu-limited?
Thanks again
Lorenzo