Guild Wars 2

Hey All,
I am a new GW2 player. I have two level 40 characters and one level 5 character. I’m doing what most new MMO players do – you know, staring around, being awe struck at the shiny stuff people wear and simply being silly around 80 chars just to befriend them.

So, I’m doing all this from my old lappy – Core i5 2510E, GT 540M and 8GB 1333Mhz. I get as far as 14-20FPS in normal gameplay, 9FPS in PvP/Champion/Dungeons/Events and 2FPS in WvW. :P Somehow I was living only with that for three months now.

Now, I have saved up some money to upgrade to a desktop probably by the 20th of August. I have decided to spend a maximum $1000-$1100 on this rig. My research for the past two weeks have brought me to the following specs:
1. Intel Core i7 3770 or Core i5 3570K (Confused help needed)
2. Kingston HyperX or Corsair Dominator 2000Mhz DDR3 RAM
3. 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (already have)
4. GeForce GTX 660Ti or AMD HD 7870 (Confused help needed)
5. 24" Samsung Monitor (already own one)

Kindly help me decide on the parts and also suggest a good Motherboard in my budget.

My questions are:
1. Will the above rig give me a constant 30FPS in Normal World (PvE) as well as WvW?
2. Will the above CPU/GPU combo be able to handle the bottlenecks and throttles better than my laptop in 720P (1280 × 720) resolution and graphics at HIGH (not ULTRA) and still give me 30FPS?
3. Will the throttling of FPS to 30 better the performance of the system greatly?

Thank you very much for your time and answers.

VijayWroX.3657:

Hey All,
I am a new GW2 player. I have two level 40 characters and one level 5 character. I’m doing what most new MMO players do – you know, staring around, being awe struck at the shiny stuff people wear and simply being silly around 80 chars just to befriend them.

So, I’m doing all this from my old lappy – Core i5 2510E, GT 540M and 8GB 1333Mhz. I get as far as 14-20FPS in normal gameplay, 9FPS in PvP/Champion/Dungeons/Events and 2FPS in WvW. :P Somehow I was living only with that for three months now.

Now, I have saved up some money to upgrade to a desktop probably by the 20th of August. I have decided to spend a maximum $1000-$1100 on this rig. My research for the past two weeks have brought me to the following specs:
1. Intel Core i7 3770 or Core i5 3570K (Confused help needed)
2. Kingston HyperX or Corsair Dominator 2000Mhz DDR3 RAM
3. 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (already have)
4. GeForce GTX 660Ti or AMD HD 7870 (Confused help needed)
5. 24" Samsung Monitor (already own one)

Kindly help me decide on the parts and also suggest a good Motherboard in my budget.

My questions are:
1. Will the above rig give me a constant 30FPS in Normal World (PvE) as well as WvW?
2. Will the above CPU/GPU combo be able to handle the bottlenecks and throttles better than my laptop in 720P (1280 × 720) resolution and graphics at HIGH (not ULTRA) and still give me 30FPS?
3. Will the throttling of FPS to 30 better the performance of the system greatly?

Thank you very much for your time and answers.

Go with:

1. I5 4670K (new Haswell) (I7 has hyper threading, which doesn’t get taken advantage of in games for the most part).
2. You can use that ram, or get 1600 ram, and over clock it if money is tight.
3. How old is the hard drive? Is is 7200 rpm? If you have the cash, consider getting a 128 gig SSD in addition. You’ll wonder why it took you so long to get one.
4. The new GTX 760s are out. Don’t bother with 660 Ti’s. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130935
5. Gigabyte makes a good motherboard. Most major names put out a good board, you just need to weed out ones that have things you don’t need.

GTX 760 2 gig $249
I5 4670K (new Haswell) $239
16 gig corsair ram $225
Motherboard $105 (GIGABYTE GA-H87-D3H)
Crucial 128 gig SSD $150

$967 before shipping/taxes

Side note: I run a GTX 460 1 gig, with an I5-2500K, with 8 gigs of ram, and get 40 fps most places and around 20 fps in large wvw battles. I still suffer from skill lag (that is something no one can really do anything about – it’s Anet-side stuff).

I have an enjoyable experience anywhere except SMC with 300 people around, but I doubt anyone enjoys that :P

Edit: What operating system you running on your desktop? If it’s Win XP, get to Win 7 immediately. It won’t recognize anything over 4 gigs of ram. Make sure its the 64 bit version.

Currently an i7 is a bit overkill for gaming. At least that’s what I read when building a new rig earlier this year.

I’ll have to take a look at my FPS tonight in some larger WVW fights to get some numbers, but I don’t recall having issues with my setup:
i5 3570K
8GB DDR3 1600
GTX 660
256GB SSD
ASRock Z77E-ITX LGA 1155
24" Monitor

Sagramor.7395:

Currently an i5 is a bit overkill for gaming. At least that’s what I read when building a new rig earlier this year.

I’ll have to take a look at my FPS tonight in some larger WVW fights to get some numbers, but I don’t recall having issues with my setup:
i5 3570K
8GB DDR3 1600
GTX 660
256GB SSD
ASRock Z77E-ITX LGA 1155
24" Monitor

Thank you very much for your reply. Asrock is not available in my region. So, I have to select an equivalent one from other makers. I am waiting for your FPS numbers as they would be huge help for me.

ASRock is a good make but you can also go with Asus or MSI, just do some research on your particular board.
Your system looks good. Even my system and those with higher overclocks than I do will get drops in WvW T1 zergs, there isn’t anything that you can do about it really.
Make sure you get a good aftermarket cooler in order to overclock your K CPU.

Stormcrow.7513:

ASRock is a good make but you can also go with Asus or MSI, just do some research on your particular board.
Your system looks good. Even my system and those with higher overclocks than I do will get drops in WvW T1 zergs, there isn’t anything that you can do about it really.
Make sure you get a good aftermarket cooler in order to overclock your K CPU.

Pardon me. But what is a T1 zerg?

@Sagramor
Did you get time to check your FPS last night? Kindly let me know what results you got.

I don’t recall what my settings were at (likely automatic), and it’s a little tricky to try and watch my FPS while in bigger encounters. I was using overwolf’s fps overlay, and in some of the bigger fights with a lot of players and spell effects I was definitely into the 30s. Didn’t have any true ZvZ last night, but a few breakouts with large numbers of players. “Idle”, and smaller encounters were almost double my bottom number. I wish I had some sort of logger for you to give you a better idea.

Like Stormcrow said, though, in the serious ZvZ fights you’re gonna get some steep fps drops, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

T1 zerg = tier 1 refers to WvW rankings and zerg is well zerg

Sagramor.7395:

I don’t recall what my settings were at (likely automatic), and it’s a little tricky to try and watch my FPS while in bigger encounters. I was using overwolf’s fps overlay, and in some of the bigger fights with a lot of players and spell effects I was definitely into the 30s. Didn’t have any true ZvZ last night, but a few breakouts with large numbers of players. “Idle”, and smaller encounters were almost double my bottom number. I wish I had some sort of logger for you to give you a better idea.

Like Stormcrow said, though, in the serious ZvZ fights you’re gonna get some steep fps drops, and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

T1 zerg = tier 1 refers to WvW rankings and zerg is well zerg

Ah, the Zerg as in Startcraft Zerg Rush… I didn’t get it before. xD

I don’t mind the FPS drops in very high and tense situations. It is completely fine if I can get 30FPS in all the normal places like the Dungeons and PvE areas in High settings and in 720P res.

After all, I am playing in 10FPS in PvE now and I’m not discouraged to stop playing it.

Fade.7658:

VijayWroX.3657:

Hey All,
I am a new GW2 player. I have two level 40 characters and one level 5 character. I’m doing what most new MMO players do – you know, staring around, being awe struck at the shiny stuff people wear and simply being silly around 80 chars just to befriend them.

So, I’m doing all this from my old lappy – Core i5 2510E, GT 540M and 8GB 1333Mhz. I get as far as 14-20FPS in normal gameplay, 9FPS in PvP/Champion/Dungeons/Events and 2FPS in WvW. :P Somehow I was living only with that for three months now.

Now, I have saved up some money to upgrade to a desktop probably by the 20th of August. I have decided to spend a maximum $1000-$1100 on this rig. My research for the past two weeks have brought me to the following specs:
1. Intel Core i7 3770 or Core i5 3570K (Confused help needed)
2. Kingston HyperX or Corsair Dominator 2000Mhz DDR3 RAM
3. 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD (already have)
4. GeForce GTX 660Ti or AMD HD 7870 (Confused help needed)
5. 24" Samsung Monitor (already own one)

Kindly help me decide on the parts and also suggest a good Motherboard in my budget.

My questions are:
1. Will the above rig give me a constant 30FPS in Normal World (PvE) as well as WvW?
2. Will the above CPU/GPU combo be able to handle the bottlenecks and throttles better than my laptop in 720P (1280 × 720) resolution and graphics at HIGH (not ULTRA) and still give me 30FPS?
3. Will the throttling of FPS to 30 better the performance of the system greatly?

Thank you very much for your time and answers.

Go with:

1. I5 4670K (new Haswell) (I7 has hyper threading, which doesn’t get taken advantage of in games for the most part).
2. You can use that ram, or get 1600 ram, and over clock it if money is tight.
3. How old is the hard drive? Is is 7200 rpm? If you have the cash, consider getting a 128 gig SSD in addition. You’ll wonder why it took you so long to get one.
4. The new GTX 760s are out. Don’t bother with 660 Ti’s. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130935
5. Gigabyte makes a good motherboard. Most major names put out a good board, you just need to weed out ones that have things you don’t need.

GTX 760 2 gig $249
I5 4670K (new Haswell) $239
16 gig corsair ram $225
Motherboard $105 (GIGABYTE GA-H87-D3H)
Crucial 128 gig SSD $150

$967 before shipping/taxes

Side note: I run a GTX 460 1 gig, with an I5-2500K, with 8 gigs of ram, and get 40 fps most places and around 20 fps in large wvw battles. I still suffer from skill lag (that is something no one can really do anything about – it’s Anet-side stuff).

I have an enjoyable experience anywhere except SMC with 300 people around, but I doubt anyone enjoys that :P

Edit: What operating system you running on your desktop? If it’s Win XP, get to Win 7 immediately. It won’t recognize anything over 4 gigs of ram. Make sure its the 64 bit version.

I have purchased the complete OS long back – Windows 7 Ultimate 64Bit.
My HDD is Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200RPM drive purchased a year ago.

One question – Will my existing PSU Corsair 600W run without any issues with the Haswell CPU? or do I need to get another PSU?

If it’s Corsair, it’s a quality PSU. You shouldn’t have any issues at all with it. You should be fine with the GTX 760 with that PSU as well. I think I recall reading that the minimum you need for it is 500 watts.

For the GTX 760: 500 watt or greater power supply with a minimum of 30 amps on the +12 volt rail

The CPU is a 4th gen version, so typically, they get more efficient as they go on. Same for video cards. The old 480 video cards needed a lot more than 500 watts if I recall.

the key 2 things for performance here are processor and graphics card.
i have a geforce gtx 480 and the i5 3570 and my fps is consistently high, even in wvw and during the heaviest of bossfights

I’ve got a 7870 and I get around 40FPS on average on almost maxed settings. Also, instead of just a 1tb HDD its worth investing into kitten for your OS also. Also like someone else mentioned, its your CPU and GPU that will do the majority of the work so investing in probably a 7970 or a 770gtx plus the core i5 is the way to go. the i7 is a bit unnecessary as of yet…

Slap on some RAM and a decent mobo PSU and case and ur set for less than $1000 Then u can spend the extra money on a black widow ultimate and a gaming mouse

Thank you all
@Sagramor, @Stormcrow, @Fade, @CalmestChaos, @SpiderPIG and @Ilithis Mithilander for your time, effort and answers.
I’ve been able to decide on my build with the help of your suggestions and some extensive local research and narrow it down to the following:
1. Intel Core i5 4670K
2. Gigabyte GA-H87-D3H
3. Kingston HyperX 1600Mhz 16GB (2×8GB)
4. Corsair 128GB SSD
5. Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 XT (Since 760 is not available here and this fits snugly in my budget)

Hopefully, I’ll get 30+ FPS in all the PvE, Dungeon content and bearable FPS in WvW as long as I keep my settings Med/High.

Thank you all for your ideas, clarifications and suggestions to help me.

Good luck. It’s a significant improvement over the original shopping list.

If you need to skimp any more you could always cut the RAM down to 8GB.

Take a little time, and research some motherboards. The one I listed, is a decent one. If you ever want to go with Crossfire in the future, this board won’t do that. There are a lot of boards near that price point, and I’m sure there is one that will fit your needs.

Gigabyte
MSi
Asus
AsRock

They all make good boards, although for some time, MSi was putting out some lower quality material boards, so I’d be wary there.

Edit: When it comes time to putting it together, be sure to google how to optimize your SSD. It will help you set your Bios up, and your system settings, so you get the best possible performance. (if it’s your first SSD that is)

You’ll never go back to just a regular hard drive.