My computer is 7 years old now, it's a Medion I picked up from Aldi for several hundred dollars back in '03. It's got a Pentium 4 processor, 2x 150GB hard drives, 2.5GB memory, and some crappy old ATI video card which doesn't have updated drivers anymore. Recently I installed Windows 7 on it. For WoW, I use the lowest graphics settings mostly (sometimes I move "View Distance" and "Particle Density" up to "Fair" or "Good"), and most of the time I max out at 10 fps for normal play, which drops to 1-5 fps during raids, the low end being for 25-mans or graphically intensive environments like ICC or Lost City of the Tol'vir. The video card does cause my computer to crash every now and then, but oddly enough, not while playing.
My brother had picked out a new video card for me for Christmas, an NVIDIA e-GeForce 8600. However, my motherboard has the old PCI slot, and this one has PCIE. So it's useless until I'm able to upgrade my entire system. I found http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814187042 which works with PCI. No fan, but it's got a heatsink. Mostly mixed reviews, but for the most part they say it works well enough to bring a little life to an old machine if you're stuck with PCI, as long as you don't expect too much out of it. It's a budget card, which is what I need right now. It's mainly just a stopgap until I'm able to get around to upgrading my entire system.
Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?