Roughly $500 Budget

[ninjee]

Good afternoon!

I'll have about $500 to spend on parts. Dont need peripherals or a monitor.

I currently have a Dell XPS 420 running a quadcore Q6600 processor. The 300 watt power supply died on it earlier in the month, and I replaced it with a 400 watt power supply. I also recently upgarded from a Radeon 2600 xt to a XFX Radeon 6570.

What I would like to do is be able to run wow on high / ultra settings, and play diablo 3 on hopefully high settings.

I have about $500 to spend, could probably swing up to $600 to $650 at most.

At bare minimum I would like to replace the motherboard, processor and ram. Probably would need a new case as well since the dell case seems pretty proprietary.

Ready, GO?

[Biernot]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor ($119.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: ASRock B75 PRO3 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($82.55 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($40.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: MSI Radeon HD 7850 2GB Video Card ($212.55 @ Newegg)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Titanium Grey) ATX Mid Tower Case ($89.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $546.07
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-09-20 01:27 EDT-0400)

This will play WoW smoothly on High/Ultra and Diablo on max.
- The case is free of choice. I just picked my current favorite one.
- If you want to spend the money, you could up the cpu to an i5, but it will not give a noticeable performance boost in the mentioned games. There are however already other games out there, that effectively can use more than 2 cores (GW2 for example) and in the future there will be more.

[Milkshake86]

This solution will play everything at High-ultra @ playable frame rates. It will probably struggle more w/ say Battlefield 3 than Modern Warfare 3, still @ 1920x1080 and 40-50fps normally should be acceptable. This is not a solution I'd recommend normally but under your situation this is a lot more powerful, and using anything but your current optical drive and hard drive would be pointless.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($89.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus 76.8 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($23.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock 880GM-LE FX Micro ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($54.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Corsair XMS3 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($26.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: OCZ Agility 3 90GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB Video Card ($149.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Cooler Master HAF 912 ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.49 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: PC Power & Cooling Silencer MK III 500W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V Power Supply ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $505.42
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-09-20 02:42 EDT-0400)