Greetings all! I have some questions about building a new gaming PC. I know you guys have heard it all so I'll try not to to be ti redundant, but some how I think that's impossible. Anyways, my current machine is old. And I knew that but I thought maybe if I stuck some RAM into it and got a better video card I'd be ok. But after some research I feel that's it's probably best to suck it up and invest into building a better machine. Here is my current machine's spec: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/... I have an old 5500fx video card in it and have 768MB of RAM in it right now. I've come to realize that I have to build my own because 1. I'm only capable of putting 1G of RAM, and 2. I have no PCIe slots which makes my choices of video cards limited. I play MMOs mainly WoW and soon Warrhammer online. The min. specs for Warhammer or a bit more than WoW, but I don't want to shoot for the min. In WoW I get about 20-25 depending on the zone I'm in. When I zone into Shattrath City in the game it's like a slide show, and I have to wait like a minute or so for everything around me to appear and load up before I can even move. But when I do get to move it's like 5-6 FPS. So, basically I just need some suggestions on a motherboard, Processor, video card, etc. to build a decent machine. I'm not looking to play crysis or anything but I am looking to get WoW and any other MMO on high settings, and run at least 40FPS, and not have all that pop in slide show I get. Just a side note, my 5500 video card is 8x AGP while my AGP slot only supports 4x, could this be causing some issues with games?? And my last question: If I get say all new parts, except for my HD, and DVD/CDr drives, will they work on the newer motherboards that are out now? So that's my situation, any help would be much appreciated. BTW, I'm only looking to spend about $250 right now. Later on I can get other things if needed but right now that's my budget. Thanks again.

You're gonna have to make some major concessions to be able to build within a $250 budget. Not only will you need a board, CPU, RAM & video card, but you'll also need a case & new power supply. As for your old IDE devices, the majority of modern boards only have one IDE channel...that means you can only use 2 of your old drives. So if you plan on keeping the HDD, one of the optical drives will have to go. Considering your current system specs, just about anything you get will be an improvement. You should figure at least $150 for a board & CPU, about $25 for 2GB DDR2-800 RAM & $75 for a decent PSU. That already puts you at your $250 limit w/o a video card or case. If you build an AMD system & get a board based on the AMD 780G chipset, you can initially use the integrated graphics, then add a PCI-e video card later. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...

So, the onboard graphics are decent enough to run WoW at higher settings? Thanks for the reply much appreciated. Yea, this is a long term project, I plan to add as I am able to afford different things. I'm not in a rush or anything, but 250 worth of stuff is good to start off with. Do you have any idea about the question I had asked in my first post about my 5500 being AGP 8x and the slot being 4x? I'm just curious how that works. So what is being used nowadays instead of ide for the optical drives? Anyways, thanks for answering, I appreciate it. I'm sure as more questions come to me I'll have a few more.

"So, the onboard graphics are decent enough to run WoW at higher settings?" Probably. If not, then medium high for sure. The 780G graphics are surprisingly strong (for onboard). "Do you have any idea about the question I had asked in my first post about my 5500 being AGP 8x and the slot being 4x?" The FX5500 isn't fast enough to take advantage of AGP 4X, let alone AGP 8x. The GPU itself is your bottleneck, not the bus. "So what is being used nowadays instead of ide for the optical drives?" PATA is actually the new correct name for the old 40-pin interface. PATA drives are IDE devices, but so are SATA drives. IDE simply means that the drive's electronics are built into the drive itself, not on an external control card. To answer your question, most DVD burners still use the PATA interface. Some of the newer 22x burners use SATA. All Blu-Ray drives are SATA devices. IMO, because most new motherboards come with at least 6 SATA connectors, SATA optical drives are the way to go. The thin cables are less of a pain to set up and allow for better air flow. First, there was Super Socket 7. Now, there's Super Socket 939. Opty 185 @ 3.2GHz 4GB PC3200 1TB 2x 8800GTS in SLI HDTV tuner Blu-Ray X-Fi Prelude A8N32-SLI Deluxe

Ok cool, excellent info Ok so say I were to get one of the newer AGP 8X video cards and used it in my current machine, and upgraded my RAM to the max which is only 1g would it get any better based on what I've said about my WoW experiences? Just curious.

You could get a better AGP card & just ride it out for a while. I don't suggest investing too much, but for about $50 you can get a Radeon X1650Pro or for about $75 you can get a Radeon HD3650. And there's always eBay.