It's difficult to say, but I'm almost 100% sure couldn't run everything on full. I had my Q6600 OC'd to 3ghz with a 8800GTS also OC'd (Not the best video card in the world) with 4gb of matched dual channel Corsair RAM and it couldn't run everything on full settings. However, the resolution you run at can change a lot too. So if you're willing to play at 800x600 resolution, it'll allow you to up your eye candy settings by a decent margin. Currently I'm running: i7 930 OC'd to 3.5Ghz nVidia 460GTX 1Gb 6Gb 3x2gb GSkill RAM Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Mobo Which allows me to run everything on full maintaining above 100FPS.
Well I'm not planning on enabling ALL settings ill still disable the graphic intense settings, i don't neccesarily need ULTRA but High would be nice. Because currently i'm playing on Fair, which is the 2nd lowest, so at this point anything is better = )
I may retract what I stated earlier, your largest bottleneck may actually be your videocard. Meaning upgrading it will yield you positive results. However, it may not increase your FPS as much as you're anticipating. That is all I'm trying get accross. Also, rather then using the Low/Medium/High type graphical settings, I suggest you change the detailed settings to adjust best for your style gameplay. For example from a farming perspective, you'd reduce ground clutter to it's lowest setting, increase terrain distance to it's highest, and turn off shadows/lighting effects. That will allow the best performance increase for your specific needs.
I don't just use the default settings, it moved the cursor to fair and from their had to reduce even more settings, i have all the intense settings disabled. On average im around 10-20 FPS but in raids with effects going off i drop between 2-10 FPS. I just want to help prevent this so i can raid w/o problems.
Look at his hardware, it has a very limited lifespan. He needs to put as little money into this machine as possible while achieving what he wants. He wants to run WoW on ultra settings and, play steam games on high, the 4850 is more than capable of that( as well as a few other similarly priced cards). Talking about staying in date or the latest and greatest is a waste of time with his current hardware. I would not spend more than 1OO bucks on a new card for this machine. IMO On another note, you could build your own machine for about 600 bucks that would blow the doors off your current machine.
That's essentially what I said in one of my first posts. But he may not be in a position to purchase a computer. Ideally, save for a new machine.
I believe the 8800GTS had a problem with wow specifically, Wow did strange things with nvidia 8 series cards for some reason. The 9 series cards did not have near the trouble.