I'll fill you all in on a dirty little secret.
The graphics engine in WoW isn't very taxing on graphics cards...you should be more than okay with a 100 dollar card ( e.g. GeForce 9600 GT ). Where you need to spend your money, believe it or not, is on ISP latency, disk and cpu performance. WoW gets bogged down more with loading graphics off the disk and coping with thousands of player positions and movements than it does rendering the cartoony graphics.
I got my biggest boost in performance from investing in an SSD to host the game files...no joke. And I've tried everything to improve performance...my rig at this point is:
NVidia 9800GX2 SLI
2x WD ADHD1520 in Raid 0
MTRON Mobi Pro 64
4 GB Patriot 1800 Mhz Ram
ASUS Striker II Extreme
Intel QX9650 Extreme at 4ghz
Enermax 1000 watt PSU
Windows Vista Ultimate 64
Water cooled.
...way the hell overspec for WoW. Actually WoW can't even keep up with itself at 1920x1200 with all settings on high, I crash out sometimes flying around Dalaran because WoW can't handle allocations of more than 2gb of memory at a time. But anyway, I digress.
You should focus on disk/cpu I/O rather than graphics for WoW. 2gb of Ram is the minimum. Faster disk the better (Velociraptor if you can afford, or multiple cheap disks in raid 0 config if you can't). Stay away from Vista unless you can afford really high end hardware to support it because it runs like a dog.
For motherboards you'll want to get a board that has the Intel raid controller built into it because it way outperforms the nVidia one with multiple disks. Since you're not going to overclock, just get a cheap board that supports the cpu you end up with. As for CPU, probably best to get a Dual Core 8500, since they're end of life and run at the best available clock speed, 3.0ghz. End of life makes it cheaper. WoW can only handle 2 cores, so no point getting more than that, and no point paying the I7 premium either.
Anyway, my two cents...good luck!
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