Guild Wars 2

To start off, I am not at all tech-savvy. I’m not even sure what an SSD is, but I’ve heard it can improve performance. Amazon sells them for about £40 or so and if they can bump up my FPS by 15 or so I’m willing to pay. Sorry to sound so demanding but I’m gonna have to rattle off a bunch of questions:

— Can you use an SSD in a laptop?
— How do they work?
— By how much will it increase FPS (if any)?
— Will it decrease loading times?
— How difficult will it be to pull off?

Okay, thanks in advance for any responses!
(my pc specs should be attached somewhere)

An SSD is similar to a hard disk, but uses different technology to store data, so it’s generally somewhat faster. (It stands for “solid state disk”, by the way.)

You can use one in a laptop, but it usually replaces the internal hard disk, rather than anything else.

They are similar to a flash drive, but … faster, basically. Wikipedia can tell you the gory details

It will almost certainly not change the FPS you get in the slightest, since that is related to the performance of the GPU and CPU in the system, not to the hard disk or SSD.

It will generally decrease load times, though “how much” depends on how fast the current system it, and how busy the existing drive is. Generally, though, they seem “super fast” compared to the alternatives.

Replacing it when you are not sure what it is, probably challenge level “solo tequatl” or so. I’d strongly urge you to get someone to do it for you … if it was worth it at all, which it probably isn’t for you.

Alright thanks for filling me in. Is there anything else I can do to up the performance?

HappilyInsane.5840:

Alright thanks for filling me in. Is there anything else I can do to up the performance?

No, not really. The hard disk or SSD, and the RAM, are usually the only upgradable components in a laptop. You already have 8GB of RAM, so that should be enough that adding extra will not significantly improve performance.

An SSD greatly improves loading times, but it will not improve FPS/in-game performance. The biggest advantage is that Windows can start up really fast, but you’d have to install Windows on that drive. It really depends if you are unhappy with current loading times.

Ram is unlikely to help either, since it doesn’t use that much memory.

The only real thing you can do to improve performance is to close unneeded background programs and also scan for viruses and malware that would slow your computer down. Gw2 is held back by processor power, and unfortunately your laptop’s processor isn’t really meant for heavy gaming. I know, since I have bought a laptop for a relative with the older version of the same processor and it struggles to Gw2.

An SSD will have no impact on FPS what so ever unless you are having severe item pop-in issues that lower frame rate, an SSD will improve load times between zones and likely stop any “pop in” objects if you experience them. FPS increases will only be achieved with better hardware, or killing off background processes to free up system resources while you play

GW2 is a very CPU heavy game (relies on CPU for most calculations, rather than efficiently handing off to GPU, this is a major drawback of DX9 engines) and your processor is both very low clock and a low end CPU opverall (only having 2 physical cores with hyperthreading)

The only way you will get any reasonable performance increase is by replacing your laptop. I strongly advise making use of a desktop for gaming purposes as it’s better value for money (you get way more performance from a £500 desktop than you would a £500 laptop). Laptop gaming on low-end laptops tends to lead to severe overheating and can shorten the lifespan of the laptop in general.

Unless you need a laptop for mobility purposes (business on the go, etc), invest in a desktop. Even a low end budget desktop will blast most laptop performance out of the water

Your real issue is that i3 if you are gonna get a laptop to play games on, it should be with a minimum of an i5 and preferably an i7.

For laptops, it’s more important to get a “HQ” processor as opposed to U ones that are meant for power saving.. (So, I5-7300 HQ over i5-7200u). Of course, that naturally means they use more power. Granted only there’s only i5 or i7 that would be that.

And yes, desktops are preferred but sometimes that is not always possible. Here’s a cheap desktop for only $400 that even has wifi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O1eCSLm9lo (well, you’d have to buy a monitor). It is not the best but it’ll give much better performance. One could also buy and install a $100 video card into it and it’ll handle a lot of games including this one very well as shown in this follow up video on the same computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O1eCSLm9lo (I would suggest the cheaper GTX 1050 over the ti version, but it’s basically the same.