Guild Wars 2

I’m looking to upgrade my CPU for something around 250 dollars.

My computer is quite old but I can’t afford to upgrade my motherboard.

My current CPU is an Intel® Core™ i5 CPU K 655 @ 3.20GHz (4 CPUs).

My current Motherboard is a Gigabyte P55A – UD3.

My current graphics card is a Geforce GTX 660 ti.

Can someone recommend me a CPU that fits my requirements?

Your CPU appears to be a dual core with hyperthreading and your motherboard is a LGA1156. If you can’t change the motherboard, then here’s a list of supported CPUs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1156
It might be hard to find them because they are 3+ years old, but they should be pretty cheap if you do. Your best options are the i5 or i7 lynnfield quad cores. Only difference between the two are higher clockspeeds on i7s and hyperthreading which doesn’t do much in games. If you are experienced with overclocking and have good cooling, then you can just get the i5 and overclock to get the same performance as the i7s.

I’m running a i5 760 with a radeon 5850 and I get 50-70FPS with all settings maxed with reflections and shadows turned off and rendering at native. There’s nothing you can do about WvW and I get around 15-20FPS on highest quantity/low quality culling settings only when there’s a super large zerg on screen. It’s still very playable.

You might be past the point where old CPUs are no longer cheap because people like you, who are looking to upgrade their old hardware are buying up the limited remaining stock, including used.

And yes, the i5-655K isn’t 4 cores, it’s 2 cores with HT. An upgrade would be a proper 4 core like an i5-7xx (750/760) or an i7-8xx (860/870/875K/880). Note that for some reason Intel has disabled the AES encryption instructions from those CPUs.

Thanks for the advice. What is the most current socket number? Is it LGA1155?

Ace.1726:

Thanks for the advice. What is the most current socket number? Is it LGA1155?

Haswell boards are the most recent and they are LGA1150

If you live near a Micro Center: ($284.98 total)

http://cart.microcenter.com/cart.aspx?RedirectUrl=http://www.microcenter.com

Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz Socket LGA 1155 Boxed P Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz Socket LGA 1155 Boxed P

ASUS P8Z77-V LX Socket 1155 Z77 ATX Intel Motherbo ASUS P8Z77-V LX Socket 1155 Z77 ATX Intel Motherboard

You might have to buy some ram, though, which would bring you to around 330 bucks.

Then there is your RAM limitation due to OS Ace. XP SP3 is almost officially dead. Microsoft disavows it next April. That will likely mean nVidia and AMD will not be porting any newer drivers for that OS beyond that point and will allow software companies not to worry about backwards compatibility to it. You may want to start thinking about upgrading.

Oh, and that Micro Center deal is very good. Sadly not everyone lives near to one. And socket 1155 is still alive and well, until Intel introduces the Haswell based desktop i3s, Pentiums and Celerons.