Trying to make a budget build for at home.

[Moose on the Loose]

I'm trying to put together a PC for use at home, but I'm sort of short on money. I've built a PC before (I used to be pretty active at these fora) but after I got it done, I've sort of gone out of touch with the digi-world.

So, now I want to build again. This would be one of those "bang for buck" ventures. My preference is AMD. I used ATI in the past and have good experiences with it, but I really don't care if nVidia has something better to offer nowadays. It would be used for home use and for World of Warcraft, so somewhat of a graphics card would be nice (although I dont need to have all the details on etc).

Regards, Moose.

[RazorDX]

For a budget of 450-500 dollars, I'd say go with a Socket 754 Sempron 64 (or if you can swing it, socket 939 A64), a gig of RAM, an nVidia 6600GT, and you can fill in the rest. Is this a complete system or will you be migrating certain components?

[Moose on the Loose]

At the moment I am using a 2 Ghz intel 400 FSB processor, with an MSI board (http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/645ultra.htm) and 512 RAM. The video card is a Geforce 4 MX 420. It's a pretty old PC that's prebuilt by Fujitsu Siemens and It's starting to let us down more and more.

I don't think much out of it can be saved. The motherboard uses a SiS chipset, which isnt the most reputable chipset and might be the cause for the instability. I could re-use the CPU maybe, but the AGP slot on the motherboard is x4 so it doesnt leave much room for expansion.

Also, this is a 300W PSU, although by a reputable brand (FSP) so I don't really dare to hook up too much new gizmo's to it. It has a 5400 RPM hard drive which is starting to make a lot of noise. At my old school where I do a little work on the computers sometimes I found a 40gig Maxtor HDD that has 7200 RPM. I'm going to totally reformat this PC tomorrow and use the new hard drive for Windows + the most important hard drives, and use the 5400 RPM 80 gig one for storage.

You guys think there is any point trying to upgrade from the system there is now ? With a decent-ish video card (say, an E-bayed 9600 Pro) this thing might actually come up with the juice needed for WOW, even though the AGP slot is only X4?

Another thing is that, although the case looks pretty "standard" to me, is that it might have proprietary size and motherboard (any idea on how to check?)