Has new patch changed pc requirements before i resub?

I've moved to single boxing for now due to money / time (I can barely manage 2 hours a week at the moment so seems a waste). However now that I've proved to myself I can't keep up with the heavy drinking anymore, that time is being freed up ;)

I've been 5 boxing previously with the following specs:

Core 2 duo 2.33
8 gig ram
GEForce 8500 512mb
win7 64bit
7200 HDD
and ISBoxer / keyclone

Now I know these are not the recommended settings and many of you will scoff at such an ancient monument, however it has worked up to patch 4.xx (I stopped 5-boxing 5 months ago). I was getting 30fps in most places on main (15 on slaves through innerspace)

So do you think this will still work at minimum specs, and will Cata require something more heavy duty?

Finally, and most importantly, is it worth waiting for Intel's new chip in Q1 next year before buying a new system?

As far as I have heard, Cata will even have lower hardware requirements then WOTLK. So should be fine i think. I'm a noob on this though :)

That is odd.

Generally with an expansion, things get prettier.
And the corresponding requirements for the game go up.
The same system doesn't run as smoothly, or you upgrade a bit.

Haven't heard anything about requirements for Cataclysm.
So don't know if they're the same, or higher or lower.

Lower makes sense in a way, Blizzard is catering to the masses in game instead of the elite 0.02% of the player base.
It could be a decent money maker, to have the game play smoothly on a larger percentage of the computers out there.

Probably it will be:

Lower for the "just barely able to play the game" specs.

Higher for "first class effects" specs.

Who knows, as time progresses so does efficiency of technology, AND the average level of technology for the user. If I remember correctly, the biggest thing with performance in dalaran was that the area was designed in such a way that more was being rendered than what was being seen, so while we can't say it was designed poorly, just not optimally. Maybe they learned from their mistakes this time around.

After this last patch I am getting really bad lag on some of my toons windows. Sometimes I think the game is locked up and it will eventually come back. I have no idea whats wrong but it didn't happen until this latest patch.