Guild Wars 2

My budget is 1.5k – 1.7k. I’ve never built my own gaming pc before and so far I’ve always played on laptops, missing out on a lot of features and good graphics.

Now I decided to get a good desktop, but I need to know the best specs I can get with that budget and if I’ll finally be able to run gw2 and other mmos, like wow or ff14,to max settings with no problems. (I can stretch 100-200€ more if necessary)

PS: how much painful is it to build a rig? Also, how long can I expect this pc to hold? Will I need to change stuff already within 6months-1y?

Thanks for your attention

That’s more than enough money to buy a rig that will run anything on max for at least 3 years or more.

Hey man that’s a good budget so you’ll have no problem getting a good pc that will run pretty much any game (MMO’s easily) on max settings.

Depending on where you’re located here’s two UK based custom pc shops:

www.overclockers.co.uk

www.dinopc.com

Both sites let you choose a custom setup and with how cheap everything is it’s not really worth looking at buying the parts separately to build yourself as custom pc shops can build it for you for the same price if you’re looking for new parts.

It’s probably worth looking at getting….

CPU: i7 4790k

Graphics Card: GTX 980

Motherboard: ASUS Z97 Sabertooth m1 or better

Case: Corsair 760t (big case, plenty of fans so your pc will have good airflow).

Other than that maybe worth getting 16gb of ram. I found that playing Ark: Survival Evolved used A LOT of ram as it wasn’t properly optimised when I played it a while back.

I hope this helps

*Edit: Other custom pc shops are available but I mainly mentioned these two because I bought my pc from Overclockers earlier this year and my friend and his family buy theirs from Dino PC

If you are playing primarily mmos, CPU is much much more important than graphics cards. Get the best/newest one you can and whatever top of the line motherboard fits with it, along with plenty of memory (at least 16gb) and a good power supply (dont cheap out and get a 400W one, get at least a 750)

It should last for years if you build it right, which isnt as hard as youd think, but if its your first time find some guides online on how to do it

I can probably play play GW2, wow, and FF14 at the same time with my 1k budget computer. I highly doubt you’ll have a problem.

I find graphic card to be more of a problem. Because most cheap computer is enough to to run those mmorpg anyway. But if you want to say “see every character model in zerg” in wvw or in tequal, you need pretty high end graphic card to do that. I’m not sure if it is even possible. You need to check if anyone is even able to do that.

Get an i5-6600k (i7s don’t give a performance increase in most games as of yet, so they’re not really worth it unless you’re streaming or doing picture/video editing) with a Noctua DH-15, a decent motherboard that will support overclocking, a 970/290x/980 depending on how much power you want, a decent power supply (check the power supply tier list, get a top tier 650-750W unit), 8 GB of ram, and whichever case you like. A Samsung 850 Evo and a 1-2 TB HDD should round it out.

For MMOs a 970/290x should be plenty of GPU (they have similar performance, which one pulls ahead depends on the game; 290xs are way cheaper here in the US so I’d go with one over a 970 all day long.

Spend the rest on a quality mechanical keyboard (Ducky, WASD/Code, Filco, CoolerMaster; avoid Razer due to low quality and (imo) Corsair (due to a nonstandard bottom row) and a decent mouse (Logitech of some sort). You’ll also be able to get a monitor if you need one.

This computer should easily last you years without upgrades, and building it is a breeze; watch Mewegg’s how-to guides youtube and you’ll be good to go.

Both sites let you choose a custom setup and with how cheap everything is it’s not really worth looking at buying the parts separately to build yourself as custom pc shops can build it for you for the same price if you’re looking for new parts.

Have you ever actually looked at prices? Barring some epic deal, building your own will save you an easy few hundred dollars.

With that kinda money you could do some serious water cool setup

thats what im talking about

I realise the OP is buying now but it might be worth holding some cash back for ~6 months time when nvidia’s new Pascal GPUs launch.

If nvidia are to be believed they’ll be worth waiting for and might age existing GPUs faster than current trends. Should you do that, I’d recommend getting something like a GTX 970 for the interrim, or even a 960 so you have more cash available for upgrading later if that’s a concern.

Metallus.7690:

My budget is 1.5k – 1.7k. I’ve never built my own gaming pc before and so far I’ve always played on laptops, missing out on a lot of features and good graphics.

Now I decided to get a good desktop, but I need to know the best specs I can get with that budget and if I’ll finally be able to run gw2 and other mmos, like wow or ff14,to max settings with no problems. (I can stretch 100-200€ more if necessary)

PS: how much painful is it to build a rig? Also, how long can I expect this pc to hold? Will I need to change stuff already within 6months-1y?

Thanks for your attention

1.Hold out until Nvidia’s Pascal cards are released. Get an aftermarket cooled 1070 or 1080 from Gigabyte or Asus and full tower case to ensure maximum air flow. Corsair and Lian-Li are good brands.

2.Buy a Skylake i7 and appropriate non-cheapo Asus board with Corsair liquid CPU cooling.

3.Buy at least 16GB of DDR4 RAM.

4.Get a good 1000w PSU.

5.Get an SSD for your main boot drive.

6.Do all of the above in 2016 while keeping up on the latest tech news to ensure whatever you buy won’t be obsolete the following month.

Optional: Noctua case fans.

1000w sounds like overkill but you’ll want the overclocking and upgrading headroom. You might wanna get into video editing someday and notice that even 16GB seems inadequate or you might wanna SLI GTX 1070’s. For a PSU brand Corsair and Seasonic are great, go with at least gold 80 for power efficiency.

Fermi.2409:

Get an i5-6600k (i7s don’t give a performance increase in most games as of yet, so they’re not really worth it unless you’re streaming or doing picture/video editing) with a Noctua DH-15, a decent motherboard that will support overclocking, a 970/290x/980 depending on how much power you want, a decent power supply (check the power supply tier list, get a top tier 650-750W unit), 8 GB of ram, and whichever case you like. A Samsung 850 Evo and a 1-2 TB HDD should round it out.

For MMOs a 970/290x should be plenty of GPU (they have similar performance, which one pulls ahead depends on the game; 290xs are way cheaper here in the US so I’d go with one over a 970 all day long.

Spend the rest on a quality mechanical keyboard (Ducky, WASD/Code, Filco, CoolerMaster; avoid Razer due to low quality and (imo) Corsair (due to a nonstandard bottom row) and a decent mouse (Logitech of some sort). You’ll also be able to get a monitor if you need one.

This computer should easily last you years without upgrades, and building it is a breeze; watch Mewegg’s how-to guides youtube and you’ll be good to go.

Both sites let you choose a custom setup and with how cheap everything is it’s not really worth looking at buying the parts separately to build yourself as custom pc shops can build it for you for the same price if you’re looking for new parts.

Have you ever actually looked at prices? Barring some epic deal, building your own will save you an easy few hundred dollars.

So…Fermi’s an ironic handle then? My first GPU was a Fermi 560 Ti ^_^ It was Asus cooled and 20% cooler than the competition…and a famous little girl show appropriated the phrase lol!

AMD may be cheaper but you won’t get Shadowplay with it and AMD is notorious for drawing a lot more power.

Metallus.7690:

My budget is 1.5k – 1.7k. I’ve never built my own gaming pc before and so far I’ve always played on laptops, missing out on a lot of features and good graphics.

Now I decided to get a good desktop, but I need to know the best specs I can get with that budget and if I’ll finally be able to run gw2 and other mmos, like wow or ff14,to max settings with no problems. (I can stretch 100-200€ more if necessary)

PS: how much painful is it to build a rig? Also, how long can I expect this pc to hold? Will I need to change stuff already within 6months-1y?

Thanks for your attention

Get the best cpu you can afford. Any game with high model counts (Diablo3, Gw2 WVW) will benefit much much more so from a beefy cpu.

With 1.5g though I would go with a I7 4790k, a 250$ Asus mobo and a nvidia 980 or 970.

It hasn’t been mentioned yet, but you should consider getting a good 1440p monitor. With your budget, you shouldn’t have a problem running the game at that resolution, and it makes a huge difference over 1080p monitors imo.

Im using 40" full hd sony bravia. Thinking to go 55" 4K (4096 × 2160 pixels).

My old sony works very good with games. No any issues it work just like monitor.

If you plan on playing anything other than GW2 on your rig, don’t waste your money on an Nvidia card right now, since they don’t actually fully support directx 12. Might as well go for a high end AMD and actually get what you are promised.

God kitten, that’s a budget.

If you’ve never built your own rig before, then it’s time for research.

pro’s of building your own rig:

-Future upgrade knowledge
-Best deals for the buck
-Satisfying and personal

con’s:

-You may kitten up if you’re not meticulous with your research (but honestly it’s not rocket science)
-Research…
-Takes longer

If you’re intimidated by the vast amounts of information people threw at you in this thread, just take it easy and start googling one thing at a time, if you’re REALLY not interested in what goes where what does what, just buy a complete rig like previously mentioned and be done with it, with that kind of budget you can just snap your fingers and have one delivered to you on the backs of underground gnomes, body guards, personal supervision technicians, the queen’s bottom and the president of the united states personally congratulating you.

…yeah I’m poor

With that type of budget go with an amd Fury, amd vishera 9590 4.7Ghz cpu, 32 gig of G Skill ripjaws ddr3 2133 memory, a 2 TB hard drive with a 240gb ssd , 750watt power supply for ~$950british pound at newegg Uk
http://secure.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?submit=view
Figure about 100 more for various little bits and you are good for at least 3 yrs if not more.

Wow so many answers, nice to see there are so many options.

I come from italy, so ordering in EU won’t be a problem. Do you know of any easy-to-read website where it’s explained how to build a rig? Many things that were mentioned, I don’t even know what they are- Also, if I buy all the stuff, does it usually come with windows installed, or you get OS separately or smth? I only owned laptops so far, so that’s my desktop experience :p

So you really suggest me to wait 2016 to get this nvidia pascal? Will it be one of those “oh new version, n bugs” ? Everytime something new releases, it has incompatibility issues or stuff like that. Oh well, thanks for the info and keep them coming. This will be my master’s degree present, so I’m going out of my way to get a truly decent pc.

PS
I have a 40’’ samsung TV screen: can I use it as monitor?

Honestly I was cheap as hell and held back my CPU (I have an AMD-FX8350) and invested more into my video card which is a GTX 970. Run the game on all high and max outmy FPS typically at 70-80 in emptier, not super dynamic areas. During heavy player load (or general LA roaming) it can drop to a 20-30 FPS which honestly isnt to big a deal imo

May update in the future but i’m waiting for dx12 to deliver on its promise before i make up my mind

imsoenthused.1634:

If you plan on playing anything other than GW2 on your rig, don’t waste your money on an Nvidia card right now, since they don’t actually fully support directx 12. Might as well go for a high end AMD and actually get what you are promised.

Edit: the 900 series are all DX12 ready wha…

Normally you can upgrade to Windows 10 for free, just follow the instructions (dedicate an entire flash drive to it) and you’ll have all your important files on them. If you lack Windows 7 or 8 then yes you’ll need to buy separately.

It’s certainly possible to use a TV as a monitor but it just isn’t optimized for it. Also the bigger the screen the more spread out the pixels. A 40" 4k monitor has roughly the same DPI as a 27" 1440p monitor. Still, there’s certainly nothing wrong with 108-110 DPI especially at 40 inches.

I’m personally waiting until 2016 to upgrade and on my list are an external SSD (my storage drive is very old it’s from 2011 1TB) PSU (currently Corsair 750w also from 2011) and Pascal up from a GTX 670 Gigabyte Windforce (I know a GTX 1080 will be way overkill for GW2 if it’s playable on a 670 but what if I wanna play Crysis 3 at full settings with some headroom for recording?)

Agemnon.4608:

So…Fermi’s an ironic handle then? My first GPU was a Fermi 560 Ti It was Asus cooled and 20% cooler than the competition…and a famous little girl show appropriated the phrase lol!

Honestly, I went for it after the man, not the GPU line

Agemnon.4608:

AMD may be cheaper but you won’t get Shadowplay with it and AMD is notorious for drawing a lot more power

Power draw is card dependent it honestly doesn’t really matter. You’re looking at <$.01 additional cost per hour run at full power draw (assuming $.14/KWH). Negligible imo, especially when you’re getting the card for $50 or more less.

As for Shadowplay, the value of that is subjective. I mean I guess it’s nice if you want to record stuff but if you have no interest in that it’s useless. In any case, it’s not worth the price increase imo; that extra money can go other places where you’ll get a lot more for it.

I don’t harbor any animosity towards nVidia, I just think that in general you’re much better off with an AMD alternative, since you can get more for your money. If an nVidia card is the better buy at a given price point I’ll recommend it

martaug.1762:

With that type of budget go with an amd Fury, amd vishera 9590 4.7Ghz cpu, 32 gig of G Skill ripjaws ddr3 2133 memory, a 2 TB hard drive with a 240gb ssd , 750watt power supply for ~$950british pound at newegg Uk
http://secure.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?submit=view
Figure about 100 more for various little bits and you are good for at least 3 yrs if not more.

This is honestly bad advice and that link won’t work. 32 GB of memory is a waste of money, that AMD CPU isn’t worth the money and you’re much, much better off with Intel. With OP’s budget a 500gb SSD is far from unreasonable (hell, my friend’s 960 GB was $186 US shipped). Overall, OP, don’t listen to this guy

Kill.3458:

imsoenthused.1634:

If you plan on playing anything other than GW2 on your rig, don’t waste your money on an Nvidia card right now, since they don’t actually fully support directx 12. Might as well go for a high end AMD and actually get what you are promised.

Edit: the 900 series are all DX12 ready wha…

Nope. As a former Nvidia fan boy, I’m here to tell you they straight up lied to everybody and only support some directx 12 features in software, on your CPU. AMD on the other hand actually supports directx 12 in hardware. The full feature set.

Nvidia cards can’t do asynchronous computing, and yet they print lies on the boxes of their product claiming full directx 12 support and didn’t come clean until they got caught with their crap performance in the first Ashes of the Singularity dx12 benchmark.

I won’t be buying my next video card from them. I’m sure they’ll have cludged together some form of support for it by their next major release in 2016 if you just absolutely feel you have to have an Nvidia card, but I’m not doing business with them anymore. Between the weird memory issues with the 970s and now this business, I’m ready to give AMD a shot at my money.

And also, please consider to put GW2 (or any other game that you play actually ) on SSD. It helps a lot with the loading times. I just moved my GW2 from an old HDD to a Corsair SSD and I get at least half of the loading times that I used to have.

imsoenthused.1634:

Kill.3458:

imsoenthused.1634:

If you plan on playing anything other than GW2 on your rig, don’t waste your money on an Nvidia card right now, since they don’t actually fully support directx 12. Might as well go for a high end AMD and actually get what you are promised.

Edit: the 900 series are all DX12 ready wha…

Nope. As a former Nvidia fan boy, I’m here to tell you they straight up lied to everybody and only support some directx 12 features in software, on your CPU. AMD on the other hand actually supports directx 12 in hardware. The full feature set.

Nvidia cards can’t do asynchronous computing, and yet they print lies on the boxes of their product claiming full directx 12 support and didn’t come clean until they got caught with their crap performance in the first Ashes of the Singularity dx12 benchmark.

I won’t be buying my next video card from them. I’m sure they’ll have cludged together some form of support for it by their next major release in 2016 if you just absolutely feel you have to have an Nvidia card, but I’m not doing business with them anymore. Between the weird memory issues with the 970s and now this business, I’m ready to give AMD a shot at my money.

Brb googling, i somewhat forgave them for the 970 flub up promising 4 GB of memory on the card when it in actuality only used 3.5GB of memory but this is something else entirely..

Edit: Ok so no GPU on the market supports full DX12. GTX 900 series will have access to resource pack 12_1 which provides better rendering. AMD cards (dont want to go into detail on the specific cards) will be getting 12_0 which provides superb resources management of processes on the graphics card to better the overall gameplay experience.

From the looks of tests I researched AMD has better OVERALL performance scores over nVidia (nvidia actually suffered from utilizing DX12 probably on account of the increased rendering) more than likely due to the increased resource management being allocated to AMD’s already superior hardware architecture. So your safe going with either but for the moment AMD is really doing great, gonna probably do more research but do remember AMD has always been quite bad with handling their drivers.

I’m gonna be stuck with my 970 for a while, better get comfy >.<

Kill.3458:

I’m gonna be stuck with my 970 for a while, better get comfy >.<

I understand, and I’m not advocating throwing away Nvidia cards or anything. I’ll keep using mine until it’s time for another upgrade. That said, unless their next generation is unbelievably better performance than the AMD option, I’m going AMD when the time comes. They’ve always had the better hardware, and yes it’s held back by their drivers, but I’ve heard good things about how much better they’ve been getting. Frankly, I just don’t feel like rewarding Nvidia for their behavior lately, so I’m going to protest with my wallet.

On a straight up technical stance for the OP though, I still say buying the AMD makes more sense to future proof yourself at the moment, unless you decide to wait for Nvidia’s 2016 releases and make a decision then. If you just don’t care about anything past directx 11 performance go with whichever you’re more comfortable with.

Since you have a high budget I at least recommend water cooling as suggested more above. When my pc starts lagging it is mostly because of the heat.
Pros:

• less dust cleaning
• much more efficiënt
• no sounds from high rotating vent
• Less heat = better performance + you can keep your window closed instead of your room becoming a sauna

I’ll allow myself to steal OP’s topic a bit and ask for help between a dilemma

Radeon 390 or GTX 970? Future compatibility is what I’m after, and seeing as both more memory on the 390 and Dx12 compatibility is present on the 390 I’m inclined to go with it, it’s just that AMD always seemed like they’re playing catch-up at the cost of higher temperatures and voltages, and clunky drivers, due to clocking the cards constantly…

I donno, I see the 970 as sort of a more stable product than the 390, but sounds like the 970 doesn’t really promise much for future gen games…

Edit: The dilemma between these two cards in particular is due to the apparent best performance for the buck currently on the market.

As I said, I’d go with the 390 right now if I was buying. If you are only concerned with current gen titles, it really makes very little difference, but if you are at all concerned for the future either buy the AMD or wait for Nvidia to put out a card that will do asynch computing. Also, the 970 has this weird issue with using more than 3.5 gb of its 4 gb memory, which will only get more pronounced as texture fidelity continues to increase. You can get the 390 with 8gb of ddr5 and a 512 bit interface instead of the 256 bit interface in the 970 at a competitive price.

I’ve been a solid fan of Nvidia for years mainly due to their much more mature and feature rich drivers than ATI, but hardware wise they’ve always been second tier, and since AMD purchased ATI their drivers have gotten better and better.

Building a rig is easier than what one could think. The only “hard” thing is the cpu paste and cooler installing. But besides that, it’s basically screwdriver and cable management.

About the specs, I’d go:
- i7 6700k and overclock it as much as you can.
- Top notch cpu cooler to reach max cpu frequencies (DH-15, Cryorig R1, Corsair H100i GTX…).
- 16GB ddr4 at 3000 or 3200MHz.
- GTX 970/R9 390 (for any mmo this is already overkill).
- SSD for gw2.
- 1440p screen.

martaug.1762:

With that type of budget go with an amd Fury, amd vishera 9590 4.7Ghz cpu, 32 gig of G Skill ripjaws ddr3 2133 memory, a 2 TB hard drive with a 240gb ssd , 750watt power supply for ~$950british pound at newegg Uk
http://secure.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?submit=view
Figure about 100 more for various little bits and you are good for at least 3 yrs if not more.

This is honestly bad advice and that link won’t work. 32 GB of memory is a waste of money, that AMD CPU isn’t worth the money and you’re much, much better off with Intel. With OP’s budget a 500gb SSD is far from unreasonable (hell, my friend’s 960 GB was $186 US shipped). Overall, OP, don’t listen to this guy

Ignore Fermi, he is an kitten. The vishera is a great cpu and 150 cheaper than a comparible Intel.

Are you kidding me? You can play GW2 on Max for a 700 dollar computer. 1.7K is unnecessary… for anything… You want to game? 1.3K is MORE than enough for 95% of games. 1.5K+ is needed for maybe about 10 games that are out there right now with 2 of them being Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3.

If you don’t want to game, and just need to do day to day clerical work, a 250 dollar rig will suffice. If you want a decent rig, a 400 dollar computer will suffice. 1K computer is considered an exceptional computer and only hardcore gamers or people who don’t know any better get anything over 1.5K computers.

You know what? Most of you guys are giving bad advice. This guy said his budget is 1.7K and you guys are telling him to get 32GB RAM and 500 GB SSD… COME ON… 500GB SSD? Seriously? What’s he going to put in it? Everything he has ever downloaded?

Here’s some real advice. Cut down your budget to 700-1.1K and then save the rest of the money for something else. But if you REALLY want to get a 1.7K computer, then ignore this advice. I’m just going to tell you that you won’t really ever use that computer to its full potential, possibly not even half the potential.

P.S. These prices are regarding building computers not pre-built computers.

@EddieMo, please give us a parts list for a $700 comp that can run GW2 on max. I personally think you are full of kittenpoo.

martaug.1762

Ignore Fermi, he is an kitten. The vishera is a great cpu and 150 cheaper than a comparible Intel.

You clearly have no clue what you’re talking about. It’s an OC’d 8350 which is like a $150-160 CPU priced at $230-240 that can’t compare to an i5 in terms of single threaded performance and barely beats it in multithreaded performance (~10% when you’ve got a stock i5). If you OC the i5 it absolutely demolishes the 9590. You can’t OC the 9590, either, because it’s OC’d to hell out of the box so you will see no performance gains from that. It’s objectively an absolutely awful purchase. If you’re going AMD you should at least get an 8350 on sale, which still isn’t the greatest purchase at all.

Don’t try insulting people when you clearly don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing when making recommendations, it just makes you look like a fool.

martaug.1762:

@EddieMo, please give us a parts list for a $700 comp that can run GW2 on max. I personally think you are full of kittenpoo.

A quick bit of mental math puts my computer at $675 including Windows and not counting my SSD/upgraded fans.

Or, alternatively:
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/mkznRB