Quote Originally Posted by 'Freddie',index.php?page=Thread&postID=170319#post 170319
i7's are all quad cores. Intel's previous (last year's) generation of chips come in both dual core and quad core. Last year's quads are called Yorkfields. i7 systems are somewhat faster than Yorkfield systems but much more expensive. At today's prices, I don't think the speed difference is worth the price premium so if I were buying now, I'd get a Yorkfield system. (When I say system I mean CPU, motherboard, and RAM. )

To be more exact I'd get either a Q9400 or Q9550 CPU, a P45 motherboard (Gigabyte makes good ones), 8 GB of DDR2 ram, a 1-TB mechanical hard drive, and 64-bit Vista. The video card depends on how big a monitor you want. You can build the whole thing for less than $1000 and it will run 5 WoW's fine.
Regarding video card/monitor I will likely be playing on a 42 inch HD LCD sitting about 5 feet away. I currently play on that and my laptop screen but I use the lowest graphic settings. It would be nice to be able to turn up the graphics a little bit so my toon could see more than 20 yards in the distance. My current video card is the NVIDIA GeForceGo 7700 GPU 512 MB and if I was playing one toon using the full settings then I'd be happy (I'm not that picky about how the video looks).