Recommended Upgrades

[Barotar]

I bought this discount Gaming PC for my gf when she expressed interest in WoW. A year later, she is raiding in WoD and needs an update. Currently, we are getting ~25-30 framerate on low to medium settings. I can probably budget around $200-$300 to throw some upgrades her way for X-mas. What do you think?

Thank you for your feedback.

Specs below:


Unit Dimensions 19.6" x 7.5" x 16.8" ( D x W x H )
Unit Weight 32 lbs
Chassis CoolerMaster Elite 431 Black / Blue Mid-Tower Gaming Case
Processor AMD FX-4300 Vishera / 3.8GHz (Max 4.0GHz)
Socket Socket AM3+
Cache Memory 4MB L2 Cache
Motherboard Chipset AMD 760G Chipset
Expansion Bays Total (Free)
3 ( 2 ) x External - 5.25"
2 ( 2 ) x External - 3.5"
5 ( 4 ) x Internal - 3.5"
Expansion Slots Total (Free)
1 ( 0 ) x PCI Express x16
1 ( 1 ) x PCI Express x1
1 ( 1 ) x PCI
2 ( 0 ) x DIM 240-pin
Interfaces
1 x PS/2 keyboard port
1 x PS/2 mouse port
7 x USB 2.0 ports (3 front 4 rear)
1 x LAN RJ-45 port
3 x audio jacks (Line In/Line Out/Microphone)
RAM 8GB DDR3 SDRAM / 16GB (Max)
Hard Drive 1TB - SATA III - 7200 rpm
Optical Drive 24x DVD±RW Dual-Layer Super-Multi Drive
Graphics Card NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 610 1GB - PCI Express x 16
Digital Video Standards DVI / HDMI / VGA
Power Supply 500 Watts
Audio Output Integrated - High Definition 5.1 Channel Audio
Networking Integrated - 10/100/1000 Ethernet
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition

- - - Updated - - -

I found a Nvidia 640 (2GB DDR3) for $35 today, but it doesn't look like much of an improvement.

[Arbiter]

Going to be completely honest in the fact that you won't be able to see a whole lot of upgrades with the budget due to things such as motherboard compatibility. Could you please get the exact model number of the PSU? That information is important to know what kind of GPU to recommend.

You could go with a decent GPU and probably a better CPU for the socket, but def need a PSU model for the GPU and would help to have a motherboard model to see what it can handle for CPUs on that socket. You may even just be better off buying the GPU (which is your biggest bottleneck at the moment) and saving the rest to replace the mobo/cpu later on.

EDIT: The 640 is much better than a 610, but it's still not enough to run WoW on high settings or anything. Maybe medium.