Guild Wars 2

This is my setup:

CPU: i5 – 760 @ 2.80Ghz – stock (1st gen quadcore)
GPU: Nvdia GeForce GT240 1GB DDR5
MoBo: ASUS P7H55 – M
Memory: 4 GB Ram
OS: Windows 7
(*almost 5 year old PC, no aftermarket Fans)

I run at low settings, with 20-40 fps in towns, 35-60 in fields / dungeons and 10-25 fps in WvW. My GPU is pretty low and I’ve been planning to replace it, but I don’t know which card to get that won’t bottleneck. If i need to replace any other parts in my setup,your suggestions would be great.

Bottlenecking the GPU with GW2 isn’t really a problem with most newer cards.

How much are you willing to spend and can your setup’s power supply provide the power needed. The GT 240 is only a 70 watt card. A GTX 650 is rated at 68 watts and has 3x the shakitten ower, 2x the texture and 4x the pixel fillrate. Also about 50% more graphics memory bandwidth. And that’s the “safe” choice since it fits into the same power envelope as the GT 240.

OTOH a new PSU is not expensive and is easy to fit.

OCZ 850W ZX Series was £142 last time I looked

Behellagh.1468:

Bottlenecking the GPU with GW2 isn’t really a problem with most newer cards.

How much are you willing to spend and can your setup’s power supply provide the power needed. The GT 240 is only a 70 watt card. A GTX 650 is rated at 68 watts and has 3x the shakitten ower, 2x the texture and 4x the pixel fillrate. Also about 50% more graphics memory bandwidth. And that’s the “safe” choice since it fits into the same power envelope as the GT 240.

Cool, thanks for the helpful info. I can spend around $100-200 for a new GPU. The GTX 650 was one of my choices, along with a HD7750.

Contiguous.1345:

OTOH a new PSU is not expensive and is easy to fit.

OCZ 850W ZX Series was £142 last time I looked

Btw my PSU is a Thermaltake LP-600AL2NH – 600W is that good enough?

600W PSU should be fine.

Stepping up the GPU and RAM should fix your issues. I was running a GT240 and 4gb on an older core 2 duo processor (E6xxx I believe) with slightly lower FPS than you’re getting now last year. i5 3570, gtx660, 8gb (on a 450W PSU) is now almost double the FPS.

well i have a much worse PC than you at 7 years and bought a GTX650ti 2gb DDR5 for £90 (was on offer usually £120-150 range) i play on high settings with 30-35fps in towns and 30-60 in the world depending on how busy, WvW in mass zergs can send me down to around 10-15fps but still fine, of course if i swallow my high settings in the culling option i can run it all without a hitch, but im vein

what i can say: GW2 uses CPU more than GPU so you will get a performance increase but the only way to really get the bets of the best is to buy a new CPU, no way around that unfortunately you could try putting bigger RAM sticks in however GW2 doesnt use more than 4gb’s so even with spare RAM you wont see a big increae. secondly this card can play fallout3, Skyrim, Crysis all on ultra settings at 30+ FPS without any problems.

as for bottle-necking your processor being a first generation (and old these days) will bottleneck newer cards and you can’t do much short of replacing the unit IF the board fits the newer ones.

note: its a big card, check to see if you have the space – i run my comp with the side off to fit in the budget card and works a treat (you can expose components they wont break)

as for your current card: GPU: Nvdia GeForce GT240 1GB DDR5 – its absolutely terrible even 5years ago, did you buy this machine as an advertised gaming rig ?

sorry one more thing: your Power supply is fine for this card i talked about and the previous one however if this is just from your spec sheet i would open your case and check, sometimes odd things happen in building machines at mass production.

Sagramor.7395:

600W PSU should be fine.

Stepping up the GPU and RAM should fix your issues. I was running a GT240 and 4gb on an older core 2 duo processor (E6xxx I believe) with slightly lower FPS than you’re getting now last year. i5 3570, gtx660, 8gb (on a 450W PSU) is now almost double the FPS.

Do you have an idea if that GPU would bottleneck on my 1st gen? I’ve read about that card it seems more powerful than a 650ti.

DrixTrix.7168:

well i have a much worse PC than you at 7 years and bought a GTX650ti 2gb DDR5 for £90 (was on offer usually £120-150 range) i play on high settings with 30-35fps in towns and 30-60 in the world depending on how busy, WvW in mass zergs can send me down to around 10-15fps but still fine, of course if i swallow my high settings in the culling option i can run it all without a hitch, but im vein

what i can say: GW2 uses CPU more than GPU so you will get a performance increase but the only way to really get the bets of the best is to buy a new CPU, no way around that unfortunately you could try putting bigger RAM sticks in however GW2 doesnt use more than 4gb’s so even with spare RAM you wont see a big increae. secondly this card can play fallout3, Skyrim, Crysis all on ultra settings at 30+ FPS without any problems.

as for bottle-necking your processor being a first generation (and old these days) will bottleneck newer cards and you can’t do much short of replacing the unit IF the board fits the newer ones.

note: its a big card, check to see if you have the space – i run my comp with the side off to fit in the budget card and works a treat (you can expose components they wont break)

as for your current card: GPU: Nvdia GeForce GT240 1GB DDR5 – its absolutely terrible even 5years ago, did you buy this machine as an advertised gaming rig ?

sorry one more thing: your Power supply is fine for this card i talked about and the previous one however if this is just from your spec sheet i would open your case and check, sometimes odd things happen in building machines at mass production.

Awesome, Thanks! so If I’m changing my CPU or even my MoBo ( I guess?) which CPU and boards would be good at a price range of $100-200 each.

I searched the card online and it is pretty big, but I think it would fit my tower case.

It wasn’t an advertised gaming rig, I asked my uncle to build this PC, I had no idea about building my own rig back then so.. I just asked him to build one for me within my specified budget, I guess that’s why he got this card. It worked pretty well with WoW and other large MMOs.

I really have no idea if it’d bottleneck your CPU, but just did a quick search. There’s one suggestion for someone running your CPU to upgrade to a 660ti if not willing to overclock, so you shouldn’t hit any bottleneck (based on that).

The PSU is OK but, and I hate it when they do this, it’s really a 500 watt continuous, 600 watt peak.

http://www.thermaltake.com/products-model.aspx?id=C_00001775

Even so you can easily double the power use of the GPU which gets you in the GTX 660/HD 7850 range of card (the GTX 660 is faster unless you get the 2GB HD 7850 GHz edition which then comes close to a tie). The GTX 660, 2GB HD 7850 GHz OC version and the 2GB HD 7870 GHz edition are all at the top end of your budget at NewEgg. The HD 7870 does use a bit more power than the other two and uses 2, 6-pin PCIe power connectors.

So lets step down a bit. At the $150-160 range (sans rebate) you could get an overclocked 1GB GTX 650 Ti BOOST or a stock clock 1GB HD 7850. Both these cards have roughly twice the performance of a stock GTX 650/HD 7750.

I am talking general gaming performance. This game is “special”. The i5-760 is still a very good CPU and mainly falls behind the current i5 CPUs in performance due to clock speed. Of course that clock difference plus 3 generations of improvements does make it 40% slower than the i5-4670K and 30% slower than the i5-3570K. But a “guts” upgrade is going to cost you more than $200 and you would still be stuck with a slow GT 240. Upgrading the video card will likely move you from GPU limited in GW2 to CPU limited.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

Thank you very much for the very helpful info! Btw I OC’d my CPU and I’m running at 3.6Ghz now.

At the very least you should be able to turn up the game settings a lot until the GPU starts to push back. Remember reflections and shadows are more CPU than GPU.

Vindictus.5706:

Thank you very much for the very helpful info! Btw I OC’d my CPU and I’m running at 3.6Ghz now.

You should probably have no issues running a gtx 650(ti)/660 or comparable in that case.

And I’d like to echo what Behellagh said. When I was running my old setup with a core2duo E6750 (iirc) and GT240 turning down/off reflections and shadows made the biggest dent in FPS. So if you get a new GPU and you find your bottlenecking look to there first.

Thanks for the replys guys! great help!