I am running one of my WoW clients on my ancient Sony Vaio PCG-V505CP notebook with an ATI mobility Radeon 9200 with 32MB of Video RAM. As you will agree, that is very very low spec.

Now, sometimes I get a bit of machine lag when riding on /follow but in most cases the minor speed increase of the Carrot-on-a-Stick on the following chars is enough to avoid that. In Outland, with the higher Polygon count, the 32MB graphics card is struggling hard.

It works, because Blizzard did intentionally keep the hardware requirements low. My recommendation: go for cheap over fast. You do not need the additional characters screens to look as beautiful as possible.

Any video chipset from the last two years that has 64MB or more video memory will do. Neither do you need 2ms response time, any generic TFT display should do the trick. If you feel like spending 4-5 times as much on displays and graphics cards as you would need to, go ahead, but it is not required. Likewise, you dont need to have more than a 20GB HDD for OS and Client and no expensive processor is needed either.

Hope this helps. For more info on the rig I am running see my first blog entry.