Low budget - new PC

[Deleted]

Hi,

I am looking for a new mainboard and processor to buy, and I'm on quite a tight budget. Good thing about it is I have a lot of stuff to be re-used. After reading around, checking out the sweetspot-builds etcetera it left me with some questions.* Ofcourse I know that it would be best to continue saving and buy with a bigger budget, but my PC has been on the edge of a brutal flaming death for the past weeks and explodes everytime Ocu'thar throws his (eye)balls to us.

I am looking to spend around € 200,- what would be around $287,- on the mainboard and the processor, and will need some new RAM on top of that as I'm running DDR2 now. I would like to keep the cost of the RAM down as much as possible, so i'd rather have 8gig then 16. I have a GeForce 8400GS graphics-card I want to re-use for this moment and have multiple HD's to use.

So what do I need?

- Mainboard
- Processor
- Ram

What do I have

- Case
- GeForce 8400GS [ nvidia.com/object/geforce_8400. html ]
- Mouse, keyboard, monitor etc.
- Harddisk
- Optical drives
- All necessary network- cards, soundcards etc.
- OS

What do I want to use it for

- WoW
- Ocassional photo-editing
- Future games like SWToR

What do I expect?

At this moment I'm running WoW on all-low. I understand it will be most likely impossible to run anywhere near ultra with my GFX-card, but I would like to run it as good as possible when I upgrade that one later on. (any indications?)

The problem is (except the budget), I know how to build a pc etcetera, but I don't really know a lot about the specs, what fits best together, and what is better left out for higher specs on another part. I found the processor and mainboard below, and thought they would fit good together, but maybe they're total .... . I would love some advice on them. (Also, I live in the Netherlands, so even though Newegg doesn't have it in stock, I can still get it around here)

My idea

Processor : AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition €103,00 - $148,00
Link (copypaste: newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103692 )

Mainboard : Gigabyte GA-990FXA-D3 €98,00 - $140,00
Link (copypaste: techbuy.com.au/p/173470/MOTHERBOARD_AMD_SOCKET_AM3_PLUS/Gigabyte/GA-990FXA-D3.asp - )

Any suggestions, options and such are more then welcome. If that's too much asked, please give me some advice on what I should look for/ read about.

Thanks a lot!


* For example the sweetspot advices a 3.1 dualcore, why not a quadcore for the same price?

[SoulForge]

What do you have now for that?

[Deleted]

I'm on a Fujitsu Siemens 'Scaleo L' prebuilt, it was my studypc untill my gaminglaptop died a horrible death.

Proc. Intel Pentium Dual core e2140 1.60ghz
Ram. 4GB DDR2
GFX. Geforce 8400GS

Edit:
ofcourse the amount of ram and GFX- card is not original. It has an onboard VGA-card, but that couldn't even load the login-screen.

[OhpUldum]

Thanks to Hyper-Threading, its high 3.1GHz frequency and the high IPC performance of the SandyBridge architecture, the $125 Core i3-2100 performance is, on average, 8.8% higher than the $140 AMD Phenom II X4 955, when it comes to gaming, according to this Tom’s Hardware article.

Even better, the Core i3-2100 outperforms the Phenom II X4 955 by 17.5% when it comes to minimum frames per second, according to the same Tom’s Hardware article.

In short, it’s the best CPU for $125-150 when it comes to gaming.
However, it’s not a perfect CPU. One big con is that you cannot overclock it, since overclocking via the base clock is not really an option with SandyBridge CPUs (You can only raise the base clock by a few MHz before getting stability issues) and also because you cannot overclock via Turbo bins, because it also does not come with Turbo, unlike the Core i5 and i7 CPUs. Overclocking by raising the multiplier is also not an option, since that option is limited to the “K” variant of Core i5 and i7 CPUs, the i5 2500-K and i7 2600K to be exact.
Then again, if you desire either or both of these features, you can simply upgrade to one of the Core i5 or i7 CPUs recommended below.

Hopefully this sheds a bit more light on why Intel vs AMD, Intel Sandybridge is getting the nod in games.

[Deleted]

The i3 2100, out preform the Phenom X4, it's cheaper aswell. That's why the sweet spot build suggests it.

Some benchmarks on Crysis on this review: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...-2100-review/6

i3 2100 is ~£90/$124
a H67 motherboard is ~£80/$105
4G RAM is ~£25/$35

[taekvideo]

You don't want to get an amd processor for wow... the intel sandy bridge cpu's outperform them by a lot and wow is dependent on a good cpu.
Here's a setup using the 2310 sandy bridge quad-core... you'd do much better with one of those. Had to go cheap on the mobo but still has the essentials.

ram
http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/129243/M...CL8D-4GBRM.asp
cpu
http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/171471/C...0623I52310.asp
motherboard
http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/169480/M...ock/H61M-S.asp

total $304.95