Guild Wars 2

Hello Tyrians.

I am looking to upgrade my computer from the following setup:

Motherboard: ASUS M4A78LT-M LE
CPU: AMD Athlon II x4 640 @ 3.01 Ghz
RAM: 4Gb Corsair DDR3 @ 669.6Mhz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 @ 2Gb
Drives: 128Gb SanDisk SSD, 1TB Seagate Barracuda SATA @ 6Gb/s

Currently, I can run Guild Wars 2 @ medium settings with FXAA enabled. I am, however, having out-of-memory (OOM) errors when playing in areas of high activity, for example the Shadow Behemoth fight, unless I switch my settings to “Best Performance”. This is due to still using Windows XP 32bit. I do have Win7 64-bit but I am having troubles with the graphics card there (probably a bad build – using an old 320Gb SATA whilst I try to fix it).

So, what I’m aiming for:

- High (if possible ultra) settings across the board with at least 30 FPS. Anything higher is a bonus.
- Stable game client that does not crash when in hi-intensity battles.

Finally, the price I’m willing to spend: Absolute max: £1000 (due to already having my GTX 660, which I will transplant into the new box.) Not looking for more than 8Gb of RAM so you can go a bit mad regarding a mobbie, chip & any cooling required (note: I’m not looking to OC unless I have to).

Thanks in advance guys and girls. I will be keeping an eye on this thread throughout the week to see what you all have to say.

Kind regards,

Donutdude.

buy a new MB/CPU and reuse the rest of your system, including your RAM.

My Advice is to buy into a 9 series Intel Chipset, so you can upgrade into broadwell when it drops next year. Alternatively I also recommend a z97 chipset so if you want, you can also upgrade to the K series haswell, haswell-DC, and Broadwell unlocked CPUs as well as the locked CPUs.

Your Z97 Motherboard runs about 139 for a decent one.

The current lowest CPU I would recommend is an i5 4460 (189 on newegg). You can get a haswell refresh 4790(i7 – $314) or 4690(i5 – $224) instead as those are the lastest CPUs that haswell has to offer.

But your 660 has plenty of life in it for this game (I still run a HD7790 which is far below that 660, and I still pull 100+ FPS on my i5 system), you might want to upgrade to 8GB of ram, but your 4GB will continue to do well for rebuild so you can save on some costs. Recycle your SSD, HDD, PSU, and Case.

and do a fresh reinstall of windows, it will do wonders since you are moving from AMD to Intel, if you go this route.

Sirsquishy’s information is pretty good. We’re always talking about this kind of stuff :P
I’d recommend his info too. My own, if you wanted maximum performance without breaking the bank or two you could possibly go for Intel 9 chipset and an i7 4790K which will reportedly be shipping with a 4.1 GHz base clock which is a substantial jump from the previous 3.5 GHz from the past four generations.

New Intel board and Intel CPU. Reuse all of what else you have. If you want, grab 8 GB of RAM so the operating system is not taking away from RAM that can be used with GW2.

Avelos.6798:

Sirsquishy’s information is pretty good. We’re always talking about this kind of stuff :P
I’d recommend his info too. My own, if you wanted maximum performance without breaking the bank or two you could possibly go for Intel 9 chipset and an i7 4790K which will reportedly be shipping with a 4.1 GHz base clock which is a substantial jump from the previous 3.5 GHz from the past four generations.

New Intel board and Intel CPU. Reuse all of what else you have. If you want, grab 8 GB of RAM so the operating system is not taking away from RAM that can be used with GW2.

An i5 is a much better option for “not breaking the bank”. It’s half the price of an i7 and gives the same performance in GW2: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

To the OP: If you upgrade to an i5 4670k (+required motherboard + 8 gb of ram), you’ll be able to run the game on high settings with at least 30 fps. Such an upgrade will cost you about $700 based on current prices. You can overclock the 4670k quite easily to get even better performance.

Those specs can still pack a good punch for GW2 (and modern games) but if you’re looking to upgrade your system just for GW2 I’d try a few tweaks before spending all that money.

Enabling the “3GB Switch” on Windows XP will most likely fix the out of memory issues and game crashes. I’ve tried this on some friends’ systems and it fixed the problem.

Also what kind of problem are you having with Windows 7 and your graphics card?

Wow, loving the feedback I’ve received thus far.

@Sirsquishy, Avelos & Kharr: Thanks for the information provided. I’ll definitely be looking into those components to see how they fit my price range.

@ArmoredVehicle: I cannot 100% remember the issue but, from memory, I keep getting a graphical driver error, with the card re-booting the display drivers. It claims that the drivers cannot speak to the gfx card properly. Normally, this would be fixed by a simple driver removal & reinstall, however this hasn’t worked, leading me to believe it’s a bad build.

What d’you think? Also, I’ll read up on the 3GB Switch for XP – thanks for the suggestion there

Nvidia had many problems with drivers lately (by lately I mean months) so it’s all a matter of getting the right ones, the driver reboot is caused by a bad driver usually (I’ve had many drivers doing this when I used my 560ti until I finally got one that works).

I don’t change drivers often, the ones that worked really good for me were version 314.22 and the more recent 332.21. Today I’ve also tried the newly released 337.88 and they’re working really good so far.

When installing drivers don’t select the express install. Choose custom installation and install only these components:

Graphics Drivers
Physx Software
HD Audio Drivers

Also make sure to tick the “Perform Clean Installation” box.

Try the 3 versions I mentioned, I’d suggest 332.21 first. They worked good for months in my case.

Kharr.5746:

Avelos.6798:

Sirsquishy’s information is pretty good. We’re always talking about this kind of stuff :P
I’d recommend his info too. My own, if you wanted maximum performance without breaking the bank or two you could possibly go for Intel 9 chipset and an i7 4790K which will reportedly be shipping with a 4.1 GHz base clock which is a substantial jump from the previous 3.5 GHz from the past four generations.

New Intel board and Intel CPU. Reuse all of what else you have. If you want, grab 8 GB of RAM so the operating system is not taking away from RAM that can be used with GW2.

An i5 is a much better option for “not breaking the bank”. It’s half the price of an i7 and gives the same performance in GW2: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

I’m referring to not breaking the bank because then you have the 6 core i7s. :P

And since when was the i5 half the price of an i7? $350 compared to $250… Sure doesn’t look like a $175 to me.

Avelos.6798:

And since when was the i5 half the price of an i7? $350 compared to $250… Sure doesn’t look like a $175 to me.

$189 for me….Ahh, to live next to a microcenter….

even newegg has i5’s for 189~. I think the i7’s start at 230 (the cost of a i5 4670K).

America always had better prices than Canada 4770K is just under $370 on newegg (Boo, newegg. Screw that place) I buy local but it’s about the same price anyway but with overnight shipping.