Little help much appreciated.

[Damos]

Been reading this site for a long time, and it has been a pleasure.

OK, not sure if this is the right forum for this, but here goes...

My cousin has a PC that is, well, less than spectacular.

The Specs:

Pentium 4 1.7 socket 478
(willamette)
intel brookdale i845

Nvidia 5200 AGP
2 gigs Kingston Hyper-X
XP Pro


He wants to be able to play WoW, CS and others... Mainly CS, with some WOW.

I have did what I can for him. I had some Ram laying around, so I added that to it...

The main question I have is, if I upgrade that video card, would it be worth it? or would it bottleneck like crazy, as I know WoW is a very CPU demanding game...

I have not tried to overclock it at all either, as he has stock cooler...

I am very strapped for cash, so it would probably be after Christmas before I could upgrade his whole system, but I do have a friend that could loan me a 7600 gs for the time being...

My main question is, would I be able to strap this together for a few months at least?

 

[flogge]

I played WoW for 3 years on my signature rig at 1280 x 1024. It was by all means playable with this system, but the performance was worse and worse as the years went by. I have read on these forums that the new expansion increases demands on your system, and it will be released in mid november.

I would have to say don't spend much if any money patching this thing up. If you can get the 7600GS and that improves things great, 0 cost bandaid. Save up and build him a new E5xxx-E7xxx C2D and 9xxx nvidia or HD4850 based system when it's possible financially. You can probably do a little better on costs if you go AMD.

 

[Damos]

Thanks for the input.

I understand that much, just hoping I can get this thing to last a few more months...

Main problem is the CPU...the one in your signature, would it bottleneck.

Anyways, thanks for the help.