As a fellow college student I definitely understand what it's like to build a PC on a budget. I just built one for 230 bucks lol. I already had a monitor (Sony Bravia 36") hard drive (was in my old Dell) cd drive (was in the Dell). For 230 (which was actually 275 with a 25 dollar mail in rebate and a 20 dollar promo code I got a Biostar A880G+ MicroATX mainboard, and AMD Athlon II 3.1 Ghz dual core CPU, an EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GT430 1024mb DDR3, 2GB (need to get more though) Crucial RAM, cheap Tiveco 550w power supply and a cheap 25 dollar MicroATX case. I can run wow as good as it needs to be run. 60 fps average ( I think that is because my monitor's refresh rate is 60Hz but I'm not sure) anyway, I can run other modern games nicely as well (Portal 2, Shogun: Total War 2, etc.) Haven't tried any games looked at as "system testers" like Crysis etc. but I think I would be alright lol. If your a hardcore FPS player you would probably be looking for something a little better but if you just play wow and the occasional other game then you'd be fine. Anyway I'm just saying that even if you go at the low end of your price range (500 I believe it was) you can have a pretty nice system. I would suggest Newegg as they sell mobo/cpu combos at discounted prices and that is probably the most common compatibility error people have. Just make sure you double check everything is compatible (you probably already know all this though, I haven't been following this topic). Also and this is a good tip for online shopping in general: retailmenot.com has lists of current promo codes for online retailers (that's how I got my $20 promo for newegg). Sorry for the wall of text btw lol.
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