Thinking of upgrading my cpu/mother/memory

[heyaz]

I have that exact same setup, except a ATI 4950 (or whatever). I added an SSD and now dalaran, wg, av, etc. are smooth as silk. I can even 5 box in the middle of the courtyard in WG with 100s of people and it stays pretty smooth, although I can't control the server lag. When I zone into a city, bg, or dungeon it is almost instantaneous.

I think you will still have problems if you just upgrade the CPU and RAM as the bottleneck is often the HD constantly loading 1000s of textures.

I run 2 teams, one of them uses mouse broadcasting with ISBoxer so all 5 windows are high resolution. I still get 20-40 fps even in WG with that setup. My other setup has the alt windows rendered at a very low resolution, and I can get nearly 60 fps in WG with that one.

I'd recommend an SSD over any other upgrade, it makes that big of a difference.