MOBO - CPU upgrade

[wevie]

Greetings and Salutations.

My nephew is a WoW gamer running on a Wal-Mart HP. He has asked me about gaining WoW performance. He wants to run WoW at max settings and get decent FPS (50+?) You'll have to excuse my WoW ignorance as I don't play.

His system specs are as follows:

Processor
2.30 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core
256 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Main Circuit Board Board: ECS Nettle2 1.0
Bus Clock: 201 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD 5.10 05/21/2007

Memory Modules
2942 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'A0' has 512 MB
Slot 'A2' has 512 MB
Slot 'A4' has 1024 MB
Slot 'A6' has 1024 MB

Display
NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 ****see below




My first step was the horrid graphics chip. I ordered a Visiontek Radeon HD 4870 and a BFG 450-Watt PSU.

This hasn't arrived yet, but now he is asking about a MOBO/CPU upgrade. Now, I'm positive his current crap box has DDR2 so I was looking at this:

Biostar TP43E
Core 2 Duo E7500

The MOBO would work with his current DDR2 and accept DDR3 if he wants in the future.

Looking for reviews on the selected items or better bang/buck items.

 

[ares1214]

biostar=absolute crapola. and also, i think that it would only work with 2 slots of ddr2 and seperately 2 slots of ddr3. ddr3 ram is cheap now, so you can get a good set from 80-120$ on the egg. its better to take the hit now and get the full ddr3 board then to really pay for it later. also, why 775? i would get this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.335007
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227478

then you could either recycle, sell, or burry his ddr2 ram, and give him much better performance for a slightly higher cost...

 

[dndhatcher]

The 4870 recommends a 500W or bigger power supply. A cheap BFG 450 may not be able to handle it, especially if the CPU gets overclocked. Cheap, unrelaible power supplies can make a good system into a flaky piece of junk, or even damage other components. I recommend getting a brand with a good reputation for reliability like Antec, Corsair, Seasonic, etc.

 

[wevie]

biostar=absolute crapola. .

That's the type of info I'm looking for!! OK, I've got one recommendation! Let's see some options!

Budget: $200 ish for CPU/MOBO

-plus-

$100-150 RAM

 

[dndhatcher]

Gigabyte MA770T-UD3P motherboard ($80-90)
AMD Athlon II x3 435 ($75) or Athlon II x4 630 ($100) or Phenom II x3 720 ($110)

A 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3-1333 or DDR3-1600 CAS 7 RAM kit should be below $150.

I would try to save some money and get a better power supply.

 

[wevie]

The 4870 recommends a 500W or bigger power supply. A cheap BFG 450 may not be able to handle it, especially if the CPU gets overclocked. Cheap, unrelaible power supplies can make a good system into a flaky piece of junk, or even damage other components. I recommend getting a brand with a good reputation for reliability like Antec, Corsair, Seasonic, etc.

Well, crap-ola. Guess I should have come here first. I researched and thought the 450w would be ample and BFG to be a reliable brand.