Guild Wars 2

Just some quick questions for anyone who has this CPU and plays GW2. How is the performance? Do WvW or big events/world bosses with lots of players run at around 30 fps on decent graphics? Was thinking about upgrading from my AMD Athlon II x3 450 and I don’t have a lot of money. Also, my GPU is AMD Radeon 6850 and have 4GB RAM installed.

That will depend on who u ask tbh. Those who play WvW but never see actual big zergs (though they may call them big) could say yes, becouse thats their experiance, they have nothign esle to go by.

However, in actual big zergs the only CPU’s that even have a chance in keeping close to 30 FPS are Intel 2nd generation or newer i5’s and i7’s with OC’s.

copkilul.2760:

Just some quick questions for anyone who has this CPU and plays GW2. How is the performance? Do WvW or big events/world bosses with lots of players run at around 30 fps on decent graphics? Was thinking about upgrading from my AMD Athlon II x3 450 and I don’t have a lot of money. Also, my GPU is AMD Radeon 6850 and have 4GB RAM installed.

The 965BE is the BEST CPU for the AM3 socket. It overclocks the most, and has the most ‘gains’ over all the other PhenomII’s when really pushed to the max.

If you are NOT planning on gutting and rebuilding your system from the ground up. Then I would dump the 90-130 for that CPU (I am considering it personally, for my AM3 system that still has a 830 CPU). But if you are, save the 130 you ARE going to spend on that CPU and plan on spending 420 on an i5-4670K/Z87 Motherboard (worth every penny) and go that route.

However, as the other poster said. If you expect ‘top of the line’ playability. You need to consider the more expensive i5/i7’s.

The 965 will perform more than admirably in much of the game but contrary to statements i’ve made in the past it does have limitations, primarily in larger WvW battles. There was a period where this same chip performed significantly worse in game and developed a lot of undeserved negative stigma that I felt needed undoing after a patch came through that significantly increased my performance far beyond what was considered possible at the time. Based on my limited wvw experience I got a little over zealous in my defense of the chip but after several days of some serious testing i’ve got to admit when I was wrong and will confess that if one plans to get into serious WvW you should grab an Intel Proc and Mobo now or wait till mid February for AMD’s next gen processors to launch if you would prefer to stick with them. If you are currently suffering game breaking performance in other areas currently and want to stick with amd the 965 will do you well and the savings over an fx-8350 and new mobo will be enough to grab you something from their next gen line up in a few months. Little bit of a waste in the long run but i still see it as a smarter move than dropping the money now and getting minimal improvement over a 965 at a fairly hefty price increase. Hopefully it won’t always be this way but intel really is your simplest option at the moment if you have the money to spend on them.

Thx for the feedback guys. I guess world events like Tequatl or Jormag perform pretty much along those same lines? Or is it a bit better?

If i were you i would save up 20bucks and get the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition instead.I owned the 965BE and the 8120,but the 8120 is by far faster and way easier to overclock,you can hit 4.5ghz easily on air ,has a much larger cache lvl aswell as it has 4 more cores.

Caedmon.6798:

If i were you i would save up 20bucks and get the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition instead.I owned the 965BE and the 8120,but the 8120 is by far faster and way easier to overclock,you can hit 4.5ghz easily on air ,has a much larger cache lvl aswell as it has 4 more cores.

Yeah, but i need to get a new motherboard aswell:( Kinda low on budget.

copkilul.2760:

Caedmon.6798:

If i were you i would save up 20bucks and get the AMD FX-8120 Black Edition instead.I owned the 965BE and the 8120,but the 8120 is by far faster and way easier to overclock,you can hit 4.5ghz easily on air ,has a much larger cache lvl aswell as it has 4 more cores.

Yeah, but i need to get a new motherboard aswell:( Kinda low on budget.

Exactly, so your choice is pretty simple.

965BE, or going Intel.

At this point in time I would not consider upgrading the entire system to AMD if you need to also switch out the Motherboard. If you were already on AM3+ My Advice would be to go with the FX-series, but since you are on AM3 instead you should only be looking at the 965BE or an i5-4670K.

That is my honest opinion, since you are looking for better performance for GW2 mainly.

Well, looks like I’ll stick with the 965 for now. I hope at least world events are playable at 30 fps on lowest settings. Thx guys!

I would honestly advise going Intel. Ive had AMD rigs for years, and only recently gone to an Intel based system. The difference is night and day tbh in terms of performance in gaming. With GW2 im getting 30fps+ in a 3-way WvW zergball with everything on high (bar player LOD at med). It feels at times like I have a massive tactical advantage over other players because they react so slowly to me.

I still have a 955BE but the pins got bent while in the plastic case during transportation (took it with me to my other home to throw into the second PC) but I played GW2 for a good amount of time on a X6 1090T and it struggled in WvW. My Intel handles WvW much better.

Unfortunately, GW2 is still very single-threaded, that’s where AMD loses out on.

Lexandro.1456:

I would honestly advise going Intel. Ive had AMD rigs for years, and only recently gone to an Intel based system. The difference is night and day tbh in terms of performance in gaming. With GW2 im getting 30fps+ in a 3-way WvW zergball with everything on high (bar player LOD at med). It feels at times like I have a massive tactical advantage over other players because they react so slowly to me.

That’s my long term plan, but since i won’t be able to get the money to do that in less than a year and a half and want to be able to play some GW2 in the meantime (+ some other games that are bottle-necked by my actual CPU) my options seem to be limited to the 965. I’ll probably just stick to the PVE/sPVP part of the game.

Hey guys, though I should share my experience with this processor (965) so far. Oc is the answer. I got good frame rate increase buy ocing it to 3.9ghz (206×19). Now my frame rates are stable at 60. To reduce frame rate drop when turning around, you should disable core parking (Google it if you need) by setting energy settings to high performance in Windows.

I am using a water cooler, but just because I live in hell (32C daily avg). I think you can get to 3.9 stable with the stock fan if you live in a nice place. I also notice that the sync option is bugged. I have to enable and disable it in the beginning of each fight in spvp otherwise the game starts with lower fps. You also have to do this whenever you apply a new frame rate limit in the games options. Finally I used the automatic clock speed feature of and overdrive as a guidance on how do to my stable Oc. It was very helpful.

Now, if you want to go to world war iii, I don’t think this processor can help you at all. For me, wxw in gw 2 is a nice idea bad implemented, then unless they fix it I’ll never even touch it.

Hope this can be of use

I have the Phenom II 960T BE, it’s still going strong. At the time of purchase it had a really nice price/performance ratio. Im not running it OC’d nor unlocked the 5th and 6th core cause it really didn’t improve frames as much.

BUT: You should not upgrade your system just to play gw2, game is too poorly optimized. You will spend money for a dissapointment. There is currently no affordable CPU that can handle WvW, large events and world boss. Im fine (60fps) on 15 player events, solo PvE and PvP (not wvw).

If you’re having struggles with smaller events/pvp and wish to perform better in these areas, that processor will help you. Anything more demanding is a no go.

In contrast, I’m paired with a 7850, which runs at 20-35% of its capacity.

I run a Phenom II x4 955 and have been satisfied with its performance so far.

I did not find it to be any bottleneck in world events nor WvW. In fact, the limiting factors on my system are memory, graphics and graphics memory (esp. textures).

also, is it true that the game tends to use only 3 cores?

sort of the game can use 20 cores but it wont see a performance boost most of the rendering and such it done on 2-3 threads 1 thread is the main thing so this means this quickly can use most of the core processing power up the rest of the threads use little power

When I say 3 cores, it’s 3 cores worth of performance. So if you have a quad core the game will roughly use 75% of the total compute power of a quad core or 50% of a hex core or 38% of a octocore but all of the cores will be used.