Hey, I'm in the same situation except I figured out all the prices and went for it
I generally went for the cheapest possible since I'm planning to sell this off right around graduation in about 6 mos. And yeah, I'm building this for GW as well. I've been getting around 10~40fps with an ooollllldddd Dell P3-933mhz/512mb/Geforce 5500 and some crappy 10gig HD. I'm hoping the new build gets me up to 30~60+.
The new PC consists of the following (prices include shipping):
1. Case $37 - cheap ATX with 5 star rating and 350W PSU from newegg
2. Mobo $37 - PC Chips K7 FSB266... for around $10 more you could get one that supports newer CPUs / from newegg
3. HDD $53 - Western Digital 80gig 7200rpm 2mb cache from newegg
4. RAM $39 - Corsair PC2100 512mb from zipzoomfly
5. DVD/CDRW Combo $35 - Sony 52x32x52 from zipzoomfly
6. Gfx card $56 - ASUS Geforce FX 6200 128mb AGP from digitalhotbuy
7. CPU $69 - Athlon XP 1900+ with copper cooling from eBay (sigh)
The total came to $324.76 including all shipping costs.
I've compared eBay prices + pricegrabber + newegg for all of these, and if eBay prices were only a couple dollars less than retail, I went for retail. The only part that's used is the CPU, and those don't break too often + it comes with copper cooling (saves $20~30).
Other cost-performance stuff I considered:
HDD - 8mb cache would have been nice but they cost $20~30 more
Gfx card - I also considered the Geforce 5700 Ultra and Radeon 9600 XT, but the GF6200 seems a wee bit faster and even a new one costs less on average than those older models.
CPU - around $50 more could have put me in 2000+ & overclocking land with a better mobo, but 1900+ seems enough for GW and other MMORPGs.
I got everything in 2~3 days except for the eBay item, which I'm still waiting for (sigh).
Hope this helps :lol:
btw don't forget, if you sell off your old rig after this you'll be spending only $100 or so...