Building new PC ~$500

Hello every one,
I've built almost all pcs currently in my house, but been out of the
techno-loop for several years. What I need is a suggestion/list of
well functioning parts to use to build myself a pc with following
specs

HD - SATA 2, already have 500GB drive, not icluded into $500 price tag
CPU -???, not quad core, will do some number crunching on the system,
but not too much designed for dual cores.
RAM 2GB+, fast enough to feed cpu.
Mother board - stable, preferably namebrand, possibly overclockable.
Video card - Good enough to max out grafix in World of Warcraft yet
leave enough CPU power to allow video recording of the game at decent
FPS with mid grafix.
Case - already have
priherals- already have

With the parts that i can get would i get a significantly better
system than say assembled by dell for same price?

The system will have win Xp or vista on it, have not deccided which
yet.

Thanks ahead

fermineutron wrote:
> Hello every one,
> I've built almost all pcs currently in my house, but been out of the
> techno-loop for several years. What I need is a suggestion/list of
> well functioning parts to use to build myself a pc with following
> specs
>
> HD - SATA 2, already have 500GB drive, not icluded into $500 price tag
> CPU -???, not quad core, will do some number crunching on the system,
> but not too much designed for dual cores.
> RAM 2GB+, fast enough to feed cpu.
> Mother board - stable, preferably namebrand, possibly overclockable.
> Video card - Good enough to max out grafix in World of Warcraft yet
> leave enough CPU power to allow video recording of the game at decent
> FPS with mid grafix.
> Case - already have
> priherals- already have
>
> With the parts that i can get would i get a significantly better
> system than say assembled by dell for same price?
>
> The system will have win Xp or vista on it, have not deccided which
> yet.
>
> Thanks ahead
>

There are a few sample systems in the guides here.

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/

The tough decision, is what to do for graphics. That makes
it harder to hit the $500 mark. You have the choices of
going with a previous generation card (there might be some
X1950 pro cards around). The DX10 situation is really a mess,
in the sense that a lot of the low and midrange cards, will
render things like a slide show. There is a table here for what it
is worth, mixing DX9 and DX10 cards together.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/10/01/the_best_gaming_graphics_cards_..._the_mo

DX9 - A X1950 Pro, with review comments $155
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16814102075

DX10 - 8800GTS for $250 after rebates.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150171

The X1950 got an honorable mention here:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2043949894&sid=1

And here they don't think WOW needs much in the way of a
graphics card at all.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/215415-33-world-warcraft-x1950xt-nvidia-7xxxx

Paul