Guild Wars 2

I’m in the market for a new gaming laptop. I’ve heard that the better GPU, price-wise, is a Geforce GTX 965M, but we all know that GW2 is more processor heavy. So while I’m getting a decent graphics card in my laptop, what Intel CPU is the best for this game? I’ve been told that i7s aren’t that great, since GW2 can’t use those to their full potential. So should I instead stick to newer gen i5?

I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to PC specs, so I’d like to get other players’ opinions before investing in a new laptop.

For GW2 (and most other games actually) it doesn’t matter wether you aim for an i5 or i7 since (as you stated correctly yourself) GW2 doesn’t really use multiple cores, so it’s the single core performance that matters.
So your decision should depend on what else you wanna do with that laptop.
Btw. – a great source for information and benchmarks when it comes to laptops:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/
If you happen to speak/understand german, you can also use their forums, bunch of smart and helpful people there: http://www.notebookchat.com/ (or you can just try writing in english, I assume that won’t be that much of a problem).

Solid state drives are AMAZING. The difference in performance on everything your PC does, from startup to shutdown and every action between, is absolutely staggering.

In terms of gaming performance, that’s actually an area where it makes less of a difference (other than speeding up loading screens) but you’ll regret it if you go for a laptop with a hard disk drive (I certainly do – feels like a piece of junk even though it’s got an i5 and 6gb RAM).

Also, it IS possible to switch it out afterwards, but usually switching the C drive on a laptop is a massive pain.

With Intel mobile CPUs it’s not just the i5/i7 designation that denotes a proper quad core but the suffixes HQ and HK on current models (MQ on the previous). For instance the i7-6600U is a dual core with HT while the i7-6700HQ is a quad core with HT (and the i5-6440HQ is just a quad core).

Nash.2681:

For GW2 (and most other games actually) it doesn’t matter wether you aim for an i5 or i7 since (as you stated correctly yourself) GW2 doesn’t really use multiple cores, so it’s the single core performance that matters.
So your decision should depend on what else you wanna do with that laptop.
Btw. – a great source for information and benchmarks when it comes to laptops:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/
If you happen to speak/understand german, you can also use their forums, bunch of smart and helpful people there: http://www.notebookchat.com/ (or you can just try writing in english, I assume that won’t be that much of a problem).

gw2 uses up to 3 cores correctly so a quad core is a must.
on laptops u should aim for i7 6700 HQ if possible, if not, search for i5 6440HQ as stated above

Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t know GW2 could use multiple cores. From previous threads, people were saying that it’s a single core game. I’ll look for the i5/i7 HQ chips when I’m selecting the laptop.

It’s a game that is, at its core, dependent on single core performance, but it does have enough threads that you’ll see benefit from a CPU with 4 threads.

Fermi.2409:

It’s a game that is, at its core, dependent on single core performance, but it does have enough threads that you’ll see benefit from a CPU with 4 threads.

That’s the point, threads. So in theory a cpu with 2 cores + 4 threads should be sufficient.
Anyway, since the question was wether to aim for an i5 or an i7, I think we all agree that it doesn’t really matter as long as we’re talking about GW2.

Except it’s not Nash. Those 4 threads running on two cores improves the efficiency of those two cores a bit. So it’s better than two cores that can only run two threads but we aren’t talking by a lot except in certain applications, that are often used to benchmark CPUs with HT.

At least in desktops, hyperthreaded dual cores actually perform pretty solidly, even in gaming applications. Specifically looking at i3s; some of them are ~as good as previous-generation i5s or even outperform them in certain applications (example: i3-6320 vs i5-4460, even though a lot of this is basically due to clockrate). That’s not necessarily incredibly relevant to GW2, although GW2 does like to have more then 2 cores of stuff to shuffle around (Which is why an i5-4690k will outperform a Pentium G3258 in GW2 at the same clockspeed- single core performance is a huge part of GW2’s performance, but it can still be limited by the amount of work the CPU can do, even if the single core performance is up to snuff)

fermi reminded me about my cousin who runs a pentium g 3258 at 4.3 ghz and yet he still gets lesser performance than my i5 2320 3.0 ghz (sandy bridge aka 2011 chip) and the performance gap is still big enough to be noticed easily