Guild Wars 2

Asking for a friend…

Can GW2 be played on a modern entry level computer? She’s looking for a budget PC, maybe in the $500 range… would this be enough to play the game at a reasonable level?

Depends on what you define as “reasonable”. When GW2 was released, I was running on a GTX970 and an i5 750 or something CPU, lol. WvW later forced me to up the specs somewhat but hell, even top of the line today will dip low.

Secondly, what the heck kind of modern machine will $500 buy? Just the graphics card – a budget graphics card – is half that price tag. Quick look at newegg show the desktops (not the gaming desktops) start at $700 and thats literally steam powered potatoes. An entry level machine I would put at $1000…

Not sure where Dawdler’s getting his information from… GTX970 didn’t even come out until 2 years after GW2 was released.

I still run the game on an medium settings at 1080p on an old laptop with a GTX660m. A modern desktop will very easily run the game just fine. At the time of writing this I’m looking at builds for around $600 that are several times stronger than what I currently have. Your friend should be fine, I would just look into some benchmarks before making final purchases.

Oh right, got the numbers confused. Was a GTX670 windforce, still laying broken on a shelf lol.

Budget laptops may be “cheap” (not $500 cheap, more like $700+) but they are crippled in terms of CPU strength, something GW2 loves.

Plus, the OP wanted something modern, which I will assume mean something that’s gonna be decent 3 years to come for current and new games. Otherwise just buy any old piece of crap. On a desktop, just a decent screen, CPU and graphics card is $200 a pop. And thats as budget as it gets, not very future proof.

I would that amount should be enough to get a system to run this on, of course not on max settings, but certainly enough to have an enjoyable and playable experience. Just be aware though that if your friend wants to play other games then she might find after a year or so she’ll end up having to upgrade.

Something to consider when you spec and price it up, in that I’d personally prioritise having a good processor & reasonable motherboard as they’re more of a pain to upgrade later. And make sure you’ve got a psu that will be likely to handle an upgraded graphics card later, otherwise you might go to upgrade it only to find you then need to replace the psu too. Just thinking ahead a bit will potentially save haste and costs if she decides to upgrade in a years time.

It might also be worth looking to see how much it would be to build one without a graphics card, then save money by picking up a used old model card off of eBay etc. Something like a GTX660 is still a reasonable card that should be fairly cheap preowned. Of courses it’s not the latest or most powerful, but it’ll still be enough to run most things at medium / high settings for a low cost.

I built a powerful machine (i5 quad, GTX1060 etc) for £470, so I think you should be able to get by.

Dawdler.8521:

…..On a desktop, just a decent screen, CPU and graphics card is $200 a pop. And thats as budget as it gets, not very future proof.

That’s a good point I didn’t take into account when I posted a minute ago. I worked on the assumption we were talking of $500 just for the tower. If she doesn’t have an existing monitor, keyboard, mouse etc then the budget would probably best be used to look at a fully preowned setup, as that would be stretching it for new.

Get a second hand computer that’s like 3 years old with decent specs. That’s easy with the budget. My 6 years old computer runs GW2 smoothly, and I wouldn’t get more than 250 bucks for it on ebay. I bought it for about 1400 then, computers lose value quickly but the requirements of games don’t change much these days.

Thank you all so much for your replies so far! It’s been 3 years since I built my current PC, so I am way out of the loop…

kurfu.5623:

Asking for a friend…

Can GW2 be played on a modern entry level computer? She’s looking for a budget PC, maybe in the $500 range… would this be enough to play the game at a reasonable level?

Well, I once successfully tried to play it on my old non-gaming laptop, so I believe your friend should be fine playing it on lower settings.

Instead of saying a budget amount, showing what the stuff is going to be is better. You could say $500, and get top line cpu and motherboard and like a 4 year old $50 graphic card.

Basically, it’s always better to list specs and not an amount. $500 Canadian is nothing like $500 American, or $500 Australian. They would all give you different parts in the end.

I would go with Faaris’ suggestion and try to get a used system if possible. If you can get a Haswell era i5-4xxx that would be just excellent since GW2 is a CPU hungry game.

The graphic card doesn’t have to be high end, a GTX 750Ti would be a good option.

It can but you’d have to self build or wait for sales (probably best to do this) Gw2 doesn’t require much of a computer but you should list the specs to be safe, in case it’s overpriced.

An i3-6100 level processor is good enough for most of Gw2, though the Pentium g4560 is better value since it’s half the price and almost all the performance. A Gtx 1050 will be a good enough card for Gw2.

It would still be a really tight budget @ $500, and you might have to sacrifice SSD…. Probably aim for 600~

kurfu.5623:

Asking for a friend…

Can GW2 be played on a modern entry level computer? She’s looking for a budget PC, maybe in the $500 range… would this be enough to play the game at a reasonable level?

I’d look around for used parts. You can get a decent computer for that kind of money if going for used equipment, much more so that buying a new one from any store for the same amount of money.

I played the game on a q6600+gtx560ti+4gb ram. open world pve 1080p ultra/low model limit/quiality (not the lowest) and i got a stable locked 30 fps, dips below in zergs and wvw, but could get a stable 20ish if lowered settings. So yeah, considering how kittenty/cheap that pc was, he should be fine