Looking to upgrade

[Sterling228]

Howdy folks. Let me start by saying, unfortunately, I am somewhat inexperienced with PC's. I am looking to upgrade my current PC.

A little background info;

I started playing WoW back in 2007 on my MacBook Pro, which was supposed to be used for college (which it did, sorta). It handled everything WoW threw at it, even raiding at the highest settings AND recording using FRAPS at the same time at 60+ FPS. It was great up until the patch before Cataclysm was released. It was having major graphic related issues, and apparently since I was on a Mac, there was no way to fix it. So I went looking for a new computer. After looking all over the place (online and in stores) I found a desktop at Best Buy. I found an (please hold your groans and eye-rolling for just a sec) Alienware Aurora R2 at best buy for around $900 on clearance. It has an Intel i7 CPU at 2.8GHz, ATI Radeon HD 5870 GPU, 6 GB of DDR 3, and a 1 TB hard drive, Windows 7 and has plenty of room to expand.

I installed WoW on it, and it worked beautifully. Now, several years later it still runs everything well except when raiding. I find that I need to turn the graphic setting down to about halfway to keep a high frame rate. It also is running slower overall than it was, has given me the BSOD and couple times, and randomly restarts like once every couple weeks, but that's another storey. And even when doing virus scans and malware, nothing comes up.

Rather than let this PC waste away, I'd like to upgrade parts of it. Would it be worth it to add a second Radeon 5xxx series GPU, or is there something else I can do to improve it's performance without breaking the bank?

The other option I have is to wipe the whole thing, since I still have the restoration software and I pretty much only use this PC for WoW and some other games.

[Fluorescent0]

You should get an aftermarket CPU cooler (a noctua nh-u14s is a great one for ~60-70$) and overclock your CPU to about 3.8-4ghz. That's what's holding you back the most when it comes to WoW (and what you should be ultimately upgrading, but it would need a motherboard upgrade as well, and that would run you from ~180$ for an i3 system to ~340$ for an overclockable i5 one)

[chazus]

Moving this to the build/upgrade subforum!

[Cyrops]

I checked here: http://www.dell.com/us/dfh/p/alienware-aurora-r2/pd
Looks like it has liquid cooling, depending how good it is, you won't a different cooler.

First you should get some diagnostic software, like CPU-Z to get your CPU and RAM info, then MSI Afterburner to try and see if you can OC your GPU.
If it's randomly restarting that could indicate a PSU problem, can you open up the case by yourself? If so check all transistors look alright, also if you can post a picture of the inside of the case.
Buying a second GPU for Crossfire is not really a good investment in such an old rig :/ You would be better off buying a newer one instead, unless you get a good deal on old one, like 50$ or less.