Which Graphics Card to get?

[ThewF]

This is absolutely completely untrue. WoW will utilize (to some degree) every core your processor has. The OP's processor, being older, is probably seeing even higher utilization of all four cores due to the fact that its being pushed harder than a newer CPU would be.

You are correct, I was under the impression that they hadn't updated the game to be able to scale across multiple threads. Blizzard added an update in late 2006 that added additional multi-core support. However this is only two cores (Threads) so my comment stands for the "Most other games" part but I was incorrect about the particular World of Warcraft comment. My bad!

The 4850 was a good option back in June of 2008, with the prices of the 4870 dropping below that of the original MSRP of the 4850 the 4850 should never be an option in the price range that the OP has posted, the 4850 is only a good buy if you already have a 4850 and are looking to get a little boost of performance when it's on sale and your motherboard supports it other then that we're looking at most GPU's that = the MRSP of the 4850 at launch doubling it's performance.

Newegg on the American side lists the 4850 at $95, shop around and you can find them for as low as $70 or if you wait for a sale (like NCIX in Canada has every week) generally you can find them at $55 - $60. The 4870 to my knowledge at Newegg was discontinued so the pricing by them is completely out of date and should be ignored completely the price I can get a 4870 for at it's lowest is $104.99 Canadian. ($100 American) sales don't happen to often for 4870's. 5770 on Newegg's site is as low as $119.99 and a decent branded card is around $134.00 these prices on the 5770 are in USD.

[Parietis]

You are correct, I was under the impression that they hadn't updated the game to be able to scale across multiple threads. Blizzard added an update in late 2006 that added additional multi-core support. However this is only two cores (Threads) so my comment stands for the "Most other games" part but I was incorrect about the particular World of Warcraft comment. My bad!

I personally am not sure I fully understand how threads translate into utilization of individual cores, but while the greatest gain is going from one to two cores, WoW does appear to utilize more depending on how heavily the CPU is being taxed. You might find this interesting, its part of the article posted today on the front page:

If you run the game in Windowed mode and open up Windows Task Manager next to it, the cause becomes clear. WoW pegs a single Phenom II core at 100% utilization. It also pegs two cores at 100% utilization, hence the step up in performance. It's only when you have three cores available that the game has a little headroom to spare. That wasn't the case with Intel's Core i7-980X, which handles the game deftly using fewer resources.

Source. Its from the AMD section of the article, as the Intel processors didn't show the effect as much.

[Deleted]

Thank you for the detailed responses, even if they may have gone a bit over my head. So I will get a HD5770 and a 450W power supply, and so then the graphics card would no longer be the limiting factor of my wow graphics, and I would be able to play at higher than 14fps on the lowest settings?
Thanks again.

Edit: would you recommend Platinum as a good brand for the card? And does "CIT 450W Gold 12Cm Silent Atx Power Supply" sound good for the psu?