Guild Wars 2

Good morning everyone!

Just put together new build (last night after 2.5 years of gathering parts, wahoo!) with following: i5 4690k (not overclocked atm), MSI nVidia GTX 660, 8 gb RAM, ASRock H97M Pro 1150 motherboard & old HDD (Hitachi 160 gb storage).

My situations & a few questions that are probably connected in one or many ways:

1) CPU temperature concerns “right out of the gate!”: Using Open Hardware Monitor I kept track on my CPU temperature (among the other items in PC). CPU was only temperature that got me nervous within 5 minutes of running GW2 as well as several other games in my library that are not as intensive as (I think) GW2 can be.

The CPU temp for all four cores reached 98-99% of “max” safe temperature in those first 5 minutes where I went from Divinity’s Reach to Queensdale & fought some drakes by the river. That has me super concerned that I’m doing something wrong.

Question: Is the stock cooler really that awful even if I am not overclocking? (as I have read many people stating during my research?). There was thermal paste on the stock cooler but perhaps that wasn’t enough or I didn’t spread it around substantially?

I have an aftermarket cooler on the way but it’s not a water cooler, will that substantially relieve the temperature whether I keep it at stock speed or overclock in the future?

2) Frame rates: I realize this has been an on-going thing since GW2 launched but I’m surprised that going from an Intel Duo Core CPU to an Intel i5 4690k does not alleviate the “stuttering” & fps skyrocketing up to 65/70 to as low as 6-8 fps whether I’m in DR or non city zones (this is after after I’ve disabled anti aliasing & other recommended graphics options from the official forums & reddit).

Perhaps my old HDD is bottlenecking my new cpu & gpu? Perhaps 8 gb of RAM isn’t enough? Perhaps I was a moron & wasted money on a mobo that isn’t good enough? I appreciate any feedback & constructive criticism you all can provide.

I’ve updated my gpu drivers & updated all I can think of. Is there something with Direct X I should double check about updating or something else with any driver updates I should look into?

Thank you fellow Tyrians & Anet in advance for your input!

Sincerely,

Xavost Athno

If you’re not overclocking, the cooler that came with the CPU should be quite enough. The thermal paste that was on it should also suffice, but maybe you wiggled the cooler around a bit while putting the PC together and created gaps? Taking the cooler and reapplying the thermal paste can’t hurt, in any case.

The frame rate issues might be related to the heat problem and disappear if you can fix that. And your HDD should only affect your loading screens, not the frame rate. Mobo looks fine, too, and 8GB of RAM are also plenty. Whether or not your new cooler will be enough for overclocking (which… wait, I don’t think you can, with this mobo? Not entirely sure, better check with an expert there) depends on the cooler; my brother is happy with his non-water cooler, I’m happy with my water cooler. Both get very acceptable temperatures.

Are you sure all those components are in working order? Nothing’s broken?

Dear Red Queen,

Thank you for the response & input! I confirmed that this mobo does provide the option to overclock (but I will confirm it further with an expert later today).

I DID have quite the struggle getting the stock cooler on (basically I got 3 of 4 points in – thought they weren’t secured…took another hour to reset them so I could get all 4 points secured/anchored in). So perhaps this is my problem & I’d never be so happy with user error than I would be if this is the case. I’ll go explore that option this evening. That will also help me confirm that nothing is broken phsyically…at least to the naked eye.

Could you point me to an online resource or suggest a google/bing line of thought to type in where I could look up acceptable/safe temperatures for the CPU? Perhaps I need to look at Intel’s website a bit closer (I’ll re-check the basikittenerature they included in the package as well.

Thank you again for the quick response. I’ll do my best to update so whatever I’m dealing with can help someone else who may be slowly gathering pc parts for an upgrade to see Tyria more clearly!

Is literature not an acceptable word? It came out as “basikittenerature” in my last message, lol

Max “safe” temperature for your CPU is usually somewhere around 80°C/175°F, but normally, it should be somewhere around 30°C/85°F. I’ve got a Xeon very similar in performance to your CPU, and I usually get ~30°C, 50°C max when I run a heavily modded Skyrim for several hours (that’s with a watercooler, so not sure how that translates to a stock cooler; probably a little higher, but I never even unpacked that thing, so I’m not sure).

If you want to check for yourself, “i5 4690k maximum/acceptable temperature” should get you what you’re looking for.

Edit: Yeah, the profanity filter goes overboard sometimes. It’s not the literature, it’s the last letter of “basic” plus the first three letters of “literature” combined that made it kick in^^

i live in SEA, so the ambient temperature is around 30’C….

my CPU temperature went to around 72’C when there are many players around. during heavy world boss fight it when to around 74’C, and the FPS drop to half, around 20+ . however, if i set the “number of high quality character displayed” to lowest, meaning i only show the basic character model, the temperature hover around 60’C. this means drawing the detailed character texture is taxing the CPU resources a lot in GW2.

i’m using AMD R9-270X. my CPU is i5-3450. 8GB RAM. Using SSD.

105C celcius is the max tj for those cpus, so with stock cooler you should be running 60-75s in game anything above 75C there should be something wrong with either mount of the cooler or with the thermal compound.

Good morning fellow Tyrians!

Just a quick update on my individual situation – thankfully it was user error.

Temperature concerns fixed, frame rate stuttering completely gone (I wasted WAY too much time just jumping & spinning camera in circles last night in LA, DR, Queensdale & Orr…got me killed quite a bit actually) & my FPS averaged between 80 & 130, would “dip” (I’m such a snob already) to 60-65 fps when there was a big fight with about a dozen players around fighting a champion & his minions & I even hit 200 fps while traveling through Bloodtide Coast (I admit there was no one around). My guildies did not get annoyed by my geeky updates of new FPS high (80, then 130, then 180 & finally 200) as the evening session went on.

I did not have the stock cooler on securely (3 of 4 points were in fact NOT on securely). I took mobo out, took everything else off except CPU & took my time removing & then securely re-attaching stock cooler for CPU. Temperatures are WAY down now, as Muslumgurseks shared above – my temperatures for each core ran between 59-73C last night after re-attaching the stock cooler. I kept checking it every 5 minutes & I went to different zones & events to test…everything except World Bosses & WvW (both of which I’m sure will have fps issues as people have been describing for quite a while).

I just want to say thank you for the helpful tips & info to my many questions.

So if you’re going to be in a similar situation where you have new pc parts & you’ve done your homework:

1) don’t give up,
2) don’t be afraid to ask for help &
3) don’t be afraid to check & triple check if maybe, just maybe the problem is a “you problem” rather than a hardware/software problem.

I’m so thankful mine was a me problem & not a hardware/software DOA problem!

Final question: should I be concerned with workload info for each core if one gets to 100% but temperature is NOT spiking up or increasing above 75C? I will research this myself but you all hvae been so helpful that I figured I’d ask it here too!