Building Budget Gamer.. this is a start.

For the vid card i would try the 8600 series from nvidia
they're directx 10 capable

I know you said you were not into overclocking, but you did not seem as if you were opposed to the idea alltogether.

That being said, if you're willing to OC the CPU just a little, I'd pick a cheaper one. Buy and E6420 for example and OC it just a bit and it will run at E6600 speeds by all accounts.

From what I gather, the CPUs being sold today seem to top out at about the same speed, so you probably wouldn't be giving much up if you went with the cheaper CPU.

Then I would take the $45 I saved from the CPU, add it to your GPU budget, and buy an 8800GTS.
I know you said you play WOW mainly, but for gaming, you will get a lot more miles out of the 8800 imho.

Then again, the GPU is easy to upgrade later. If you plan on doing that, it might not be too bad to go with a lower gpu now. Overall, I'd take the faster GPU now though.


As for motherboards, the P35 chipset is, I think, supposed to launch on the 4th of June. Everything points to that chipset being superior to the P65 chipset. That increase will be small at stock though, and may give higher OC potential, but those boards will be more expensive than the current P65 boards. The other advantage of the P35 will be their compatibility with intel's 45nm chips and, at least on some mobos, support for ddr3.

So you can wait a few days and spend significantly more to give yourself a larger upgrade window in the future, or buy now, spend less, get good performance, and be more limited down the road. Each approach has its benefits.

I would definitely consider the 8800 though, even if you have to streatch a bit. That card should allow you to play anything with a decent amount of eye candy for a good while to come.

all the stuff you have there is ideal for OCing i would definately push the 8800gts 320 (any manufacturer) if you could and dropping to a 6420 would be a good idea other than that good build amazing what budget means nowadays

As for the case, it is important to have adequate airflow. Whether you get a case that comes with fans or buy them individually, the important thing is that the case itself allows for sufficient movement of air over your main heat generating parts (CPU Heatsink, Memory, Northbridge, gpu, etc.)

The advantage of buying fans separately is that you can choose which one you want. For example, you can choose large quiet fans to reduce the noise output of your comp.

The case you chose will be fine.

As for memory, if you're going for a Core 2 duo CPU and a P65 mobo, then you need DDR2 ram. For the prices of ram right now, I'd spend the extra few bucks on DDR2 800.

Personally, I'd buy the Patriot eXtreme 2 gigs of DDR2 800 memory. $89 after mirb at newegg (again, you can use the few bucks you'd save over the corsair for the GPU). This memory has gotten very good reviews and has pretty good timings. And it's cheap. But what do I know? I'm still running DDR.