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Right now I would recommend either the  ATI 4770 or the ATI 4830 as a good option. They will not break the bank, but have fairly good specs.

I have a 4830 in my gaming machine.

If you want to wait a bit, the ATI 5000 series of cards will be out soon (I'm hoping this month, but the INQ hasn't said anything, and they're usually first to the story), and will drive the prices of the 4000 series cards even lower than they already are.

But if you don't want to wait, get a 4870 1GB.

CPU is down the road, if at all w/out a concurrent mobo upgrade, which would change the rules anyway. First issue is the increased real estate; 1920x1200 is getting up there. Not surprised a 1650 doesn't cut it when a 1900/1950 wouldn't either.

If the PSU's in good shape with good current on the 12v rail, I'd likely side with Books and say 4870 in 1GB flava. The increased VRAM helps significantly at high res; there's little diff at 1680x1050 or less unless texture loads are really heavy. 4770s are sweet and use less power, make less heat, but are only starting to get into halfway decent supply and also have only half the memory bandwidth of 4850s/70s/90s. Not really cost competitive atm with 4870s, now down to or below $130 in 512MB, ~$150 for 1GB. 4770s are mostly holding around $110-$120.

I really like the 4890, but you'd pay rather more and they mainly come into their own when OCed, which might strain that PSU a bit. Might be worthwhile if the card will last into Win 7 usage- the new chips are DX10.1 and support fancier rendering modes & features once above XP, which only has DX9.0c. The more card you have, the more eye candy you can turn on, tho framerates will still be CPU-limited.

In 6 months there will be better buys, supporting DX11 and better performance, as even next-gen midrange cards will outperform today's high-end; so if you can wait that's a good approach.

With the original PSU good, one thing to consider is an aux PSU for the videocard. Another is that Win 7/64 will be much happier with RAM over 2GBs and VRAM in the GB+ range, due to the way the Win32 API maps memory/ VRAM. XP is happiest with 2GBs and, say, 512MB VRAM. IIRC AMD is coming shortly with a quad-core, 3.6GHz CPU. It's all improving, absolute and bang/buck.

Well consider this...if you gut it and rebuild, you are looking at likely over $400 depending on the parts. Gotta consider:

-Board
-CPU
-Heatsink (unless you get a model that comes with one)
-GPU
-RAM (I forget this a lot but when you get a new board, you'll likely need all new RAM)...especially if you plan on Vista/7
-Optional new PSU depending on the amount of power parts you dump in it

AMD 690 is still a decent board so its not like you really have to buy new. Unless your board maker is a flake on bios update and you really have to have better.

What i'd prolly check with that budget is the benches on sites like Tom's for some of those GPUs at that res. See which one gives you the best performance for the price. Then put the rest into a good Phenom II if your bios supports it. But I would keep in mind during all of this, the power draw if you go too high performance.

I personally am running a 430W Antec, but i'm running it in tandem with a Thermaltake 250W 5.25 GPU PSU that is meant for SLI rigs. So in otherwords, my PSU is taking less stress and I can afford to dump on more. But you'll need to keep in mind how much you can really do. Looking at those 4770s would be a nice idea but you may just want to settle for a 4850/4830 if the 47s can't handle the res.

akb825 wrote:

If you're worried about DirectX 11, it's been 3 years and nobody's really relying on DirectX 10 yet, so by the time it becomes an issue it will likely be time to upgrade anyway.

The first DX10-only games are out, and perhaps Ear might disagree, at least in principle. He's a big racing fan (nearby thread).

You could probably overhaul your machine to something with much higher performance for just a bit over $200 if you wanted to.

GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 MicroATX mobo for 50 bucks. It's no frills, but it overclocks and it's cheap, and has a very good rep.

An Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 is only 70 bucks and can easily get a 50% overclock on stock cooling.

You can get a 4850 now for 100 bucks. Although I'm not sure if that's better than the 4770.

Also, damn you americans and your cheap computer parts. This stuff in Canada is marked up by more than just the currency conversion.

Yes, well WoW still has lesser requirements than say... Call of Duty 4. But higher requirements than it's purdiness would lead you to believe.