Frosstbyte

Instead of continuously bumping the old thread in which we were discussing building gaming computers what had, in large part, diverged off into how to spec pre-fab computers and get good deals, I decided that I should just make my own new thread which I could tailor a bit more specifically the questions and issues I have as I embark on this little project.

I have a friend who is going to help me once the pieces start arriving, but I need to come up with a list of parts to stick in the thing. As background, my primary computer gaming activity is WoW. I dabble around in other things now and again, but usually if I want a non-WoW game I'm playing on my Wii, so the rig I put together does not need to (and for budgetary reasons cannot) be the latest, greatest most blistering fast Crysis face melter ever created. I'm mostly trying to upgrade from my limping, pathetic laptop into something more stable and faster so I can enjoy the WoW expansion at something above 15 fps (<10 in raids).

My budget is about $1000. I need to purchase a monitor along with the computer since I previously used a laptop, and will probably also need to purchase an operating system, so include those in your calculations. I'd like for this to be a flexible, expandable machine so that as I get more liquid assets I can improve on it.

At this point, I'd mostly like some input on about how much I should allocate to each piece of the machine and any brand recommendations people have. I've done some rough calculations and am becoming very very intimate with newegg, but it's a bit hard for me to sort through the zillions of options up there, so some guidance would be much appreciated.

Thanks ahead of time.