Guild Wars 2

Currently running game on i5-2400 (OCed from 3.1 to 3.8 ghz) and radeon 5850. Gw2 loads up all 4 cores up to 95-100%, on the other hand msi afterburner shows gpu load only 50-60% and i experience massive fps drop in www when 2 blobs meet. FPS drops from 40-50 to 15-20. Will upgrading my cpu to something like i5 4670k drasticly increase fps? Anyone using this cpu or i5 3570k?

i5 3570K is a fantastic processor to upgrade to. a 4670K is not needed unless you wanted to keep your computer up to hardware date or something. A fair many people I know use 3570K and they say it’s great for GW2

If all 4 cores are at 95-100% then there is something else running on your system chewing up a core’s worth of CPU power.

Ivy Bridge is about a 10% faster than Sandy Bridge at the same clock speed.

GW2 can and will use up an i5 in certain situations. its why i now recommened i7’s to people.
its not 100% NEEDED, but it sure as hell helps when u get into those situations where the i5 gets all used up.

So u need to look at the 3770k or 4770k, becouse a 3570k will just be a faster runing i5 but may still hit that 90-100% usuage mark where performance drops.

Sicne your coming from a different chipset u might aswell go for a 4th gen haswell (4770k), becouse if u go for a 3770k ur still gunan need a new motherboard.

Your other choice is to search around and find yourself a 2600k or 2700k which is a 2nd gen i7 Sandybridge and will fit in your current motherboard. And being a sandybridge, it will OC like a champ. With top end air cooling u could get maybe 4.7 or 4.8ghz and with a AIO water cooler your looking at ~5ghz.

Now this is somthing that every1 needs to consider when looking at 2nd gen vs 3rd gen vs 4th gen intel Desktop CPU’s.

A sandybridge Chip like a 2700k can hit 5ghz with a AIO water cooler.
A Ivybridge chip like the 3770k will hit 4.7ghz with a AIO water cooler
A haswell will hit 4.5ghz with a AIo water cooler.

The Ivy is roughly 7% faster per core than a Sandy
the haswell is roughly 5% faster than Ivy.

But Sandy can OC higher. This ofsets the difference in per core performance and makes each one pritty much equal when comapred to each other on the same cooler using each ones highest OC it can manage.

All clock speeds are roughly the average speed one gets when u put enough voltage in for heat to become the limit of what the cooler can handle. This is not to say u wont get better results due to the silicon lottery

As to your question on FPS.
If ur getting 15-20 fps now in massive zergs, then u can expect (with the CPU’s above at around 4.5ghz) around 20-30FPS. Again the kind of zergs im thinking of a huge, so we may be thinking of different sized battles, but you would see an improvment.

So how should a Gulftown i7 980x @ 4.0ghz handle the game?

I see. Thank you.

Here’s the thing, hyperthreading acts like an overclock and that’s it. Going from an i5 to an i7 on the desktop isn’t giving you 4 more cores. You still only have four cores it’s just that each core can be a bit more efficient when a core is running two threads simultaneously. It simply uses “mirrors” to convince the OS that you have 8 cores.

The improved efficiency varies greatly depending on the apps being run. In general going from an i5 to an i7 is around $100 for maybe 20% better overall performance, 40% in some specific benchmarks but you rarely see even 10% in games.

Yes Haswell (ix-4xxx) is 15-20% faster than Sandy Bridge (ix-2xxx) at the same clock. But going to an Ivy Bridge i5-3xxx doesn’t need a motherboard transplant. I don’t know why some people believe that dropping another $150 on an upgrade is a trivial matter for most people.

Sorry yes brain fart on my part there (tired). the 3rd gen ivy bridge CPU’s do NOT need a new motherboard.
Some games do show improvment with an i7 over an i5. And as GW2 has shown, it can push a i5 to the max, at which point a i7 with its HT will perform better. Crysis 3 is another example. If u have the GPU power at ur disposal u will notice a difference between i5 and i7.
In general a i5 is fine for gaming though, and as i said its not 100% NEEDED, but if u can afford an i7, get one.

So the OP should look for the following.
i5-2500k, i5-2550k, i7-2600k, i7-2700k, i5-3570k, i7-3770k.

I didn’t need to get on your case SolarNova, it’s just I see too many threads here and in other game’s tech sections where an OP asks for a system with a $1000 budget only to get responses in the $1200-1500 range or ask what kind of upgrade they could do with $200 and get responses in the $500 range.

It’s like the insistence of some to put SSDs in every configuration regardless of budget. I guess it’s the new “SLi/Crossfire” or “liquid cooling” in every budget range you use to see in in PC gaming magazine ads.

Behellagh.1468:

it’s just I see too many threads here and in other game’s tech sections where an OP asks for a system with a $1000 budget only to get responses in the $1200-1500 range or ask what kind of upgrade they could do with $200 and get responses in the $500 range.

This, all of this

Indeed . i understand.
In ur example of SSD’s i also am constantly having to tell people to NOT get an SSD if they are on a tight budget simply becouse its one of the last things u get. As you know, the money u spend on an SSD could easily be better used for a better GPU ro CPU.

So yea. .i understand

SolarNova.1052:

Indeed . i understand.
In ur example of SSD’s i also am constantly having to tell people to NOT get an SSD if they are on a tight budget simply becouse its one of the last things u get. As you know, the money u spend on an SSD could easily be better used for a better GPU ro CPU.

So yea. .i understand

I keep seeing people say this about SSD’s. I understand if you were going to put a hard drive in the system in addition to the SSD anyway, but otherwise, if I had to choose (and we’re talking strictly for a gaming box) the cost difference between a 120gb ssd and a ~500gb HDD is between 40 and 50 dollars depending on price fluctuation. Is a 40-50 dollar upgrade to your cpu or gpu going to be a big step up? Probably not. However, in a game like GW2 where a ton of assets seem to load from the hard disk, I’d venture to say that the SSD is a superior choice. Again, this is on a budget build, where you’re not going to be buying super high dollar CPU’s and GPU’s anyway.

Well let’s see. Prices from NewEgg, I tend to ignore sales and rebates since they can change day to day.

$60 – 500GB WD Blue drive.
$110 – 120GB Samsung 840

So it’s true, only $50 more. But what does $50 buy you CPU/GPU wise in a low budget build. Lets assume you put around 20% of your $1000 budget toward each component. What does an extra $50 buy.

$200 – i5-4570 3.2GHz quad core
$250 – i5-4570K 3.2GHz quad core unlocked overclocking

$200 – FX-8350 4.0GHz octo core
got nothing

Video cards

$200 – GTX 660
$250 – GTX 760 about 20-25% faster

I’ll make an exception on sale prices with AMD cards simply because AMD just slashed prices on the HD 79xx line and when this happens with either nVidia or AMD, NewEgg puts their existing stock on “sale” until they restock at the new price.

HD 7950 falls in the $210-260 price range depending on default clock speed, OC ability and cooling option. In some cases it means they are now cheaper than HD 7870s. HD 7950s were between $270-320.

So you are right about CPUs on a $1000 rig budget. You get OCing and if you aren’t into OCing, big whoop.

But GPU side, $50 can buy you a nice chunk of performance with nVidia. May not help as much in GW2 but in PC gaming in general it will.

But what do you get with a 120GB SSD? Once you throw on the OS and basic utilities you are down 35-40GB leaving you with just 80-85GB for your stuff. GW2 is around 17GB so one MMO equals almost 20% of your remaining drive. If you have a Steam habit watch out, either play a few of your library at a time, deleting and redownloading what you feel like playing that day and go cold turkey every time there’s a big sale. I only have 5 games from Steam and they range from 2GB to 19GB totaling about 40GB. My “games” folder is 100GB in size and I don’t have that many games loaded.

So what do you get when you choose to “live” in the equivalent of a one room apartment. Boot, program startup and game level loading in half the time. We’re talking only a couple handfuls of seconds. So you get a couple of extra minutes per hour of playing versus stretching, taking a swig of whatever quenches your thirst or pondering your revenge against whatever sent you to a waypoint.

So fast load times while living in a “teeny tiny living space” Vs higher frame rates or improved visual quality?

Second, the “but it’s only $50 more” is a slippery slope my friend. That’s a salesman tactic. If you have an extra $110 sure, toss in a 120GB SSD as well as your HD. But if you are a gamer then tossing away 75% of your storage space for faster loading times is a really bad trade off that you are going to regret rather quickly.

or you can get 32 gigs of ram, allocate 17 of that to gw2 on a ramdisk for 20x faster than ssd. #truestory