The PC (Personal Computer) is a highly configurable and upgradable gaming platform that, among home systems, sports the widest variety of control methods, largest library of games, and cutting edge graphics and sound capabilities.
@skullpanda1: I'd generally recommend an i5, but the dude's primarily going to be playing WoW and only has £450 to spare. Also, the i3's performance is often underestimated, it might surprise you how close it can come to matching an i5 in real world gaming performance.
@lukereees: If you're able to go up to £450, you could bump the cpu up to an i3-4360, and have enough left over to get a 1TB HD instead.
@lukereees: Probably, yes, assuming it's a regular SATA drive and not too old to be useful and reliable. Is there anything else in your current PC you could reuse? The case, DVD drive, or RAM maybe?
@pcorb: its around 3-4 years old, its an acer aspire i think the ram is like 3gb its so bad and i actually play wow on it with low graphics and 20ish fps makes me feel ill... the dvd drive is fine i assume the case is worn and quite small so probably will get a new case
If you wanted to save a bit of cash you could swap out that i3 in favor of the Pentium G3258. It's basically an i3 with hyperthreading disabled and is overclockable. Really great performing CPU for the price, and you can still upgrade to an i5 4690k in the future.
WoW came out in 2004. While it has evolved and they recently upped the graphics, it's still a relatively low spec game. Any modern PC should be able to run it just fine so long as it's not a Pentium or Celeron* processor with built in GPU.
EDIT: Just took a look at it. You should be more than fine. I'm not even sure how much WoW can take advantage of quad-core processors anyway. If it's unoptimized for quad-cores an i3 at 3.5GHz is better than an i5 at 3GHz, but I haven't been keeping up with any of WoW's tech progress. I'd suggest quad core for future games but if your primary concern is just WoW you'll be fine.
*Yes, Pentium and Celeron do still exist. They are the bottom tiers on Intel's five star system (i3 = 3 stars, etc.).
@lukereees: Oh, if it's a pre-built case then yeah, I definitely wouldn't bother reusing it. Those things aren't designed to be built in. I'd be reluctant to use a mechanical drive that old as a boot drive for a new system. You might be better off just using it for additional storage and booting off a new drive.
You can save a tenner by reusing the DVD drive at least.
@turtlebird95: The G3258 would be the best budget chip by a mile if it weren't for the fact that a number of modern games refuse to work with a non hyper-threaded dual core, and that looks to be a growing trend.
I honestly wouldn't worry about overclocking unless you plan on doing a lot of emulation with things like Dolphin and such. The stock speeds will be fine for pretty much any game I can think of.
If you decide you do want to overclock make sure to read/watch a bunch of guides and fully understand it before attempting. It's pretty simple though, just a matter of going into your bios and tweaking a few a numbers.
@pcorb Which games have been doing that? I'm currently using one until I can swing an i5 and I haven't really seen or heard of any particular games that won't run on it for that reason. (Unless you mean the games that require 4 cores, but those probably wouldn't run on an i3 either)
@lukereees: There are 2 USB 2.0 ports on the front of the case, but no USB 3.0. At the back (on the motherboard) there are 4 USB 3.0 and 4 more USB.2.0. There won't be a lack of USB ports, no.
@turtlebird95: I've heard specific accounts of Dragon Age Inquisition and Far Cry 4 having issues with the G3258, and from what I can tell, Frostbite and Ubisoft's engines just don't want to work with dual cores in general.
Looks fine (possibly even overkill) for WoW. If it were me, I'd consider going for the cheapest 'known' memory/mobo, and putting the small savings towards a small SSD instead of the HD. Amazon has a 120 for £50. That's not for everyone and involves some sacrifice, but it'll make everything feel so much faster.
Personally I wouldn't go below i3. Mine is starting to show it's age a bit, but it'll cope for a while.
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