Upgrade advice requested for WoW gamer...

E

Eradan

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 7, 2006
Messages
1,188
Hello, everyone.

My sister-in-law currently has an Athlon 64 3000+ on an Nforce 3 chipset board. The board is populated with 1.5GB of DDR1 RAM and an AGP ATi X800XL. Her LCD's native res is 1280x1024. She runs Windows XP, uses AIM, browses the Web, and plays TONS of World of Warcraft. She's mostly satisfied with her gaming performance but wouldn't mind being able to crank up the image quality.

Unfortunately her video card is failing. There is a grid, if you will, of red dots, across her entire display. I'm an IT professional and have performed a number of troubleshooting steps, checking cooling, drivers, power supply, underclocking her video card, etc. and have seen no improvement. I suspect the RAM on her card is just about toast.

With only about $300 to work with, we're considering our options to fix the situation. Easiest would be to find a replacement AGP card, install, and continue as usual. I'm also looking at possibly a new board, CPU, memory, video card that might fit within budget (going to be tough). Would love to get her into a PCI Express board.

Has anyone been through a similar situation? Any advice, suggestions, comments, would be much appreciated.

E
 
Hehe. I can play WoW with everything cranked up on my old shuttle box. WoW is NOT a machine intensive game anymore. Pretty much any modern graphics card is going to own WoW performance wise. Heck, i was running WoW on an old X800 card on high settings for quite a while.
 
AMD Barton 2500 Overclocked
Abit NF7s
1gb or Corsair 400 ddr1 ram
300w power supply

6800gt

j/k :) that's what I used to play WoW on and it played pretty well. You can pretty much take any current generation affordable cpu like this with 2gb of Corsair ddr2 800 @ $30 and pair it up with an ATI 3850 (what I recommend) or an 8800gt (starting to sell for cheap now). For the motherboard,I would get an Abit IP35-e. (rebate at newegg)
 
I'm gonna flamed here but I think she ought to save her drinking money for another month or two and then scope techbargains.com and bensbargains.net for a good HP or Dell deal.

Here is one that came up, $400 for an almost brand-new setup. Everything but a monitor (which she already has).


http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=206892876


These deals happen all the time, if you check those sites daily.
 
Stop recommending the 8600, it is such a horrible card. I would just pick up a decent card for around 100-150 and save the rest. Just build her a completely new machine later down the line.
 
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions.

I can get her a lightly used X1900XT and a PCIe, Socket 939 board that will allow her to use her current RAM and CPU for about $100. Probably the most cost effective way to go.

The Sapphire AGP 3850 doesn't look bad either but its $214 at the Egg.

We'll see...

Thanks again!

E
 
Before going out and splurging on new parts, I'd find out what is causing the red artifacts.

If you suspect the RAM, then try running memtest
 
Chaoticon said:
Stop recommending the 8600, it is such a horrible card. I would just pick up a decent card for around 100-150 and save the rest. Just build her a completely new machine later down the line.
Click to expand...

The 8600 GT is a fine card for everything but Crysis. Yes, you get much more performance moving up to a 8800 GT, but some people are on a strict budget and sometimes that means you can't get everything you want.

It is by no means a horrible card, especially for what the original poster is going to do with it. WoW @ 1280x1024 requires about as much horsepower is helping granny up after she slipped in the kitchen.
 
Eradan said:
Thanks, everyone, for the suggestions.

I can get her a lightly used X1900XT and a PCIe, Socket 939 board that will allow her to use her current RAM and CPU for about $100. Probably the most cost effective way to go.

The Sapphire AGP 3850 doesn't look bad either but its $214 at the Egg.

We'll see...

Thanks again!

E
Click to expand...

Don't do this. There is no need more for anything more than a top-end AGP card in WoW.
 
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