[quote name='gindias']He wanted a cheap solution and I offered something from personal experience that is cheap and more than meets his needs. I dont spend my Saturday nights looking for cheap parts and compairing bench marks, I guess I should have recommended a $600 new build instead.[/QUOTE]
I don't spend my saturday's comparing benchmarks, I already retain that information from my vast experience and knowledge with pc parts. I build PC's every month or two in every price bracket so I tend to know a lot about pc part solutions off hand and staying within budget (or below).
As for finding cheap parts and comparing different price values, I use the website,
PC part picker (as most people do now days) since it literally takes all of 5 seconds to find the part I'm looking for and to see if anything is on sale in different areas (besides looking at other daily deal sites like slickdeals, fatwallet, etc.), as well as to see a 6 month price history; although some insanely good sales don't get recorded on part picker since some promo codes or rebates don't show up automatically with their search crawlers. I actually was in the middle of playing planetside 2 between deaths and only took all of 30 seconds to post my reply to your post.
If you didn't understand that "recommending" the $600 PC build as a joke, then you should just read the whole post again.
The 8400gs was a good budget card back in 2007, but now, its too old and too expensive compared to all of the cheap "display" cards in the sub $30 market that offer twice the performance with HDMI connections and the ability to offload HD video transcoding from the cpu. Shit, even the
Zotac GT 610 is $10 AR on newegg is about on par with the 8400 GS. Btw, Intel HD 3000 gpu built onto many CPU's now day's is about the same speed as an 8800 GT.
The only way someone now days buys an old 8k series card new is if it was free after rebates or they live in India or Russia where decent pc parts are hard to find and insanely expensive.
Since OP failed to give us a budget initially, most of us assumed an entry level discrete card in the $50-100 price range to give the best bang for buck value in performance. Even the cheap $40 HD 6570 is a huge step up from the $15 HD 6450 or the $30 8400GS and would be the bare min to recommend in terms of value and abilities in this price range. It really depends on what the resolution of the monitor and/or the resolution OP's wife plans to play with.
I'm re-downloading WOW right now and I'll throw my HD 6450 into my old e6600 (2006) computer to simulate OP's computer; CPU is a little slower but its the only thing I have left that's close. I'll run some benchmarks with some other cards I have laying around, but not too sure how well that assessment would be since I won't be able to fight in instances, or the very least in larger areas with lots of mobs, to get more appropriate normal gameplay fps or to test the new expansion pack; don't feel like spending the money to reactivate my account and I haven't played since Cataclysm came out in 2010.
