Computer upgrade advice

I suggest a minimum of 16GBs of RAM.

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That RX 5500 is a fairly new gpu and is definitely a budget card. You’re not likely going to find a better system for a lower price right now due to the chip shortage and inflation.

If I have any other suggestions, I would say to look for a system that is fully upgradeable without voiding any warranties, like Digital Storm’s prebuilt PCs, but you’ll probably spend more on their stuff.

I think the following is a must (i.e. bare minimum):

  • Current gen i5 or Ryzen 5
  • 16GB RAM
  • AMD RX480 / Nvidia GTX1060 (dedicated)

You can of course do better, but anything less than this will have serious, noticeable, performance problems.

The only reason I’m going so low/old on the video cards is because we are talking about WoW which tends to be CPU limited.

Friendly advice? If you can stomach the finance charge, use Affirm. You can buy on Amazon with it, and get a decent rig. Bought a laptop on there for work but handles games well, and with like $50 upgraded from 8gb to 24gb ram, and it can go up to 32, and would just take another $50.

When it comes to picking your processor and your video card they are something worth doing some research on what performs best and at what cost. Like video cards are usually less than $250 for about the first 60% of performance and over $1000 for about the last 20%. For processors, AMD has tended to be cheaper than intel, but I’m not sure where they are right now. There are tons of videos and such that do real world benchmarking to test performance. Both of these are the place to spend your time researching where the sweet spot is in your budget, because they will probably be around 2/3 of the cost of your system. And when not building it yourself, the rest tends to be you get what you get.

One more thing as an aside, if you can choose a power supply it is usually worth picking one up that is more than you need. Replacing parts in a computer over time is cheaper than just buying a whole new computer every few years. A beefy power supply will usually let you upgrade your video card without trouble, where being minimalist about it means you will probably have to replace both. It is likely to be less than $40 up front, but can save you double that in the long run.

Recommend a minimum 16 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX Graphics, Windows 11 (not 10), Intel i5 CPU or AMD Ryzen, Dedicated Video memory… for playing WoW. You can actually play WoW on a non-gaming PC under $1,000 but I’m not supposed to tell you that. :hot_face:

Thanks for all of the feedback and tips! I heard you on the 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD so now I’m looking at this one hoping for a Prime Day sale…anybody see any glaring problems?

Amazon ASIN # - B09YCG2XGC

OP you should be fine with that I bought this about a year and a half ago and the game runs fine .

Added a 500 gig hhd to it as well as upped the ram from 8 to 16 and replaced the 256 nvme ssd to 1 TB nvme ssd

Edit: Base price was around $700 - $750 after taxes .

Yeah, I have bad experience with Ryzen 9 5900X setup. RAM cannot hit 4000mhz because of the CPU, bad BIOS, buggy drivers and USB dropouts.

My ancient gtx 1060 3GB is past it, surprisingly I still get 50fps at 4K on medium settings. I’m waiting a few months for video card prices to fall, everything costs extra in Australia.

I am pretty sure you could get a similar built system with a i7.

The upgrades you choose to get an i5 to be as smooth as possible to appear or feel like a i7 would be a waste of money.

with an i5 even if you maxed out the ram and raided drives then the i5 will clearly show the stuttering inside the game. Yes yes I know you will just lower the video quality but there will still be freezing up issue as when the i5 will be a bottleneck.

My advice would be build a cheap i7 that you can upgrade over time.
This way your nerves will be spared and you will attain greater enjoyment for the next 5-8 years.

The processor is fine, it’s usually the video card that is the bottleneck.

While i7 is great. His budget can be an issue. $900 is not a lot of budget.

I am forgetting newer gen i5’s are indeed better but 5 years ago I trashed my i5 because even though I had the best video card of it’s time it was still the cpu bottle neck. I tweak settings so hard to make it feel like a i7 but there are limitations.

Download some more RAM and delete system32.

Go away troll

If I want great gaming then I do it on the cheap.

I go for just the best motherboard that can support the lowest cheapest cpu.
Then I went for the very cheap GTX960 and middle of the road ram quality. Then buy one SSD.

Doing it this way you have tons of future room for massive upgrades that you can do for the next 5 years and still be current with most of the newest games out there. Then the only next upgrade you need to do is the video card. Copy migwiz folder from a windows 7 pc and you can use it to copy your old OS to the new Windows 10 or 11.

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