I was recently given a hand-me-down PC, a Pentium 4, 1.7GHz with 256 ram. There is one game and one game only that I’ll ever be playing on this thing and that’s World of Warcraft. To help get things rolling a friend was kind enough to let me borrow his old GeForce 5200. While I’m not having any problems running the game, I can’t help but yearn for a more polished experience. In order to get a decent frame rate I’m forced to lower all the specs to the bare minimum. My question is what card would you all recommend for my particular system to get the most WOW has to offer before I get into the overkill range. I’m fully aware the highest end cards would be inappropriate due to my system’s sagging specs and that it would only bottleneck their performance. Thanks for the help in advance.

You need a lot more RAM.

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The GF FX 5200 is a particularly terrible card.

I would think you can find a rather cheap nV Geforce 6600(non-GT) or Radeon 9600Pro (try and get PRO or XT over plain R9600). If they are only a small money boost, then either an R9800, X700, X700PRO, or GF6600GT would give you aditional visuals and still be at the very edge of you useability, but even then you are likely still to be very system limited with that particular type of pentium, and with your memory limitations.

My personal suggestion would be to get whatever is cheaper between the GF6600plain and R9600Pro.


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I should have made mention that anything pertaining to the hardware side of gaming is new to me. As far as the ram goes, alot more isn’t an option. In fact I can only upgrade to a max of 512. Do you all think I’d get a significant boost in performance by adding another 256? I was thinking along the lines of the 6600GT’s myself though I had read problems concerning both the power consumption (keep in mind I have to hook this stuff up myself and anything more complicated than what I experienced with the 5200 may prove problematic) and heat. How serious a dive in performance would it be to opt for the plain ol 6600?

The plain GF6600 and R9600Pro should fit under your normal power envelope. The GF6600GT would require an additional molex connector, draw a little more power, and create slightly more heat than the other two, but it would offer noticeably more Ooomph, but may strain your PSU.

I think 512MB would help, you're still stuck with a weak CPU, but the memory requirements for games has increased alot, and even some are better off with closer to a Gig (HL2, BattleField2).


- You need a licence to buy a gun, but they'll sell anyone a stamp <i>(or internët account)</i> ! - <A HREF="http://www.redgreen.com/" target="_new"><font color=green>RED </font color=green> <font color=red> GREEN</font color=red></A> GA to SK

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2381" target="_new">The 6600GT does well in WOW</A>. Problem is the game is also quite CPU dependent and needs 512MB ram to play well at high detail levels. An A64 3200+ scored 20+ fps over a AXP 3200+ at 1024x768 max details. I doubt you'll ever be able to crank the details up all the way at any resolution with that system, but you cpu is way over minimum spec a least so video card and doubling the ram would be a nice start for increasing visuals and keeping it running smooth.




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