Guild Wars 2

Budget: ~$1500
Looking for a good build for a PC to pretty much exclusively play Guild Wars 2 (and do some work on it). I hear GW2 is pretty heavy on the CPU so having a good CPU seems to be a must.
Would love some recommendations for parts, not a really techie guy, so any help is great! Thanks!

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1HlY1

Something like this should do rather well. If you can reuse an HDD/OS/whatever you can trade the GPU up if you want, although a 7970 is more then enough to play GW2 well.

You can probably do better for the money, but I opted for a decent bit of convenience sort of stuff- full modular PSU, SSD, etc.

Top end Haswell i5 or i7 K version CPU with a Z87 motherboard. GTX 770 graphics but that’s a bit of overkill. 8-16GB of higher speed DDR3 memory, -1600 or -1866 with CAS 9 or better, 1.5 Volt.

High quality 650 Watt PSU, Corsair is a good brand.

At that price point I would consider an SSD for a OS drive, 120GB, Samsung 840. Couple it with a more reasonably sized data drive, 1-2TB in size, 7200RPM, 64MB cache.

I’m still a believer in Optical Drives. Basic DVD burner is $20.

Case is up to you. Something that’ll fit you motherboard and has several fans, more with air filters the better.

Overclocking that CPU, which you will be encouraged to do, needs a better cooler than stock Intel so I like the Phanteks PH-TC12DX dual 120mm fan cooler as a reasonably priced air cooler.

Hawaii Islands is being debuted today(high end versions). We will see what the new offerings do the the market. Heck sale 7970s are already sub $300 (currently there is an asus $268). Anywho don’t pick your gpu quite yet. Wait for a bit to see what amd’s release does to pricing.

That said, for $1500 you can get a beast of a system. Oh and make sure you get a case you like. You’ll be looking at it often and if you’re they type that gives two hoots. it’ll bother you to no end if not.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1Hw4b

Tweeked Fermi’s one.

2×8 GB RAM , ur using a dual channel CPU, so no need for 4 sticks.
Swapped the H80 for a H100i, if its not a H100 or equiv AIO cooler then u should just get a top end aircooler.
Changed the mothered board to somthing more gamer orientated, and better looking to boot
Change Windows 8 for Windows 7, just becouse i prefer W7 :P

As the above poster said however, AMD’s new GPU are coming soon, u may want to hold of for a bit if ur at all interested in staying up to date.

SolarNova.1052:

Change Windows 8 for Windows 7, just becouse i prefer W7 :P

There’s no reason to get Windows 7 these days. It’s not going to be supported for as long, is slightly more resource intensive, and Windows 8 is better when it comes to navigation.

If you really hate the start screen, just get one of the programs to get the start menu back. I’ve actually found that I prefer the start screen.

So yeah, do this guy’s build, but with Win8.

I still like windows 7 and have used both. It will be supported a long time you can still use XP.

I see no reason to get the i7 games do not use hyperthreading and won’t for a long time if ever. Sapphire makes good video cards but I would get a dfferent model. 16GB for a gaming PC wll never be used or will 8 but it seams to bee the sweet spot.
This would save you about $200 off your budget and game just the same.
In my opinion the best PC case made (add the extra fans one in the front intake and the other top back blowing out)
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/1HD3V

zerk.9701:

I still like windows 7 and have used both. It will be supported a long time you can still use XP.

XP is far behind Vista/7/8 in terms of features. As for 7 keeping up with 8, it’s already not getting DX 11.1. Really, getting an OS that’s a version old is just a foolish enterprise in any sense.

As for the build, there’s no reason to spend that much on an air cooler, go for water. Also, games are already taking advantage of more then 4 cores. Crysis 3 did, BF4 will. At this point in time, an i7 is looking like a good buy. For ram, there’s no reason not to go for 16 with that sort of budget. Even if it’s not really useful now, this sort of PC will easily last 5~7 years, when 16 gigs of ram will be nice.

Fermi, unless ur getting a H100 or equivalent AIO, a top of the range air cooler will perform just as well and cost less than a lesser AIO water cooler, with the only downside being their massive size.
For example:
The H60 cost the same as a NH-D14 but the D14 performas better.
The H80 costs £10 more than the D14, performs about the same.
The H100 costs £20 more than D14 and performs better.

Zerk, games DO use HT, they dont use it well, but they do use it. And also consider that the new generation of consols will NEED games to be properly optimised for 8 cores, otherwise they simple wont work/perform good enough. (each single core in the consols is only runing at like 1.6-1.75 ghz). Meaning all the consol ports (and lets face it many games nowerdays are consol ports) will be better optimised for PC’s with 8 or more CPU threads/cores.
Ofc this doesnt help GW2, but as we all know, u dont build a rig for 1 game. And GW2 does use HT in some situations. An i5 can be maxed out by GW2, at this point an i7 has an advantage.

As for RAM, its so cheap nowerdays to get 8 or 16gb that there is no reason not to get it. It will ensure that u never run out of RAM.

Hyperthreading is merely a way for Intel cores to run more efficiently by trying to execute two threads simultaneously. The end result simply looks as if the core is overclocked slightly (10-20%) but in some cases can actually perform worse than no hyperthreading at all.

Multithreading, that is already being done but balancing the amount of actual work between major threads to get the multiplicative effect that multiple cores can provide is difficult. It’s not like ray tracing, video encoding or file compression where the same block of code is simply run on all available cores with one supervisory thread coordinating.

As for the next gen consoles, there are already reports about the OSes on them stealing some of those eight cores for exclusive use. Still as SolarNova says, to get the most out of those new consoles, someone, likely game engine and 3rd party library developers, will need to create versions of their product that scale better to number of cores available.

SolarNova.1052:

Fermi, unless ur getting a H100 or equivalent AIO, a top of the range air cooler will perform just as well and cost less than a lesser AIO water cooler, with the only downside being their massive size.
For example:
The H60 cost the same as a NH-D14 but the D14 performas better.
The H80 costs £10 more than the D14, performs about the same.
The H100 costs £20 more than D14 and performs better.

Exactly. If you’re dropping $1500 on a computer, you should spend the extra couple bucks to get a really nice cooler.

Fermi.2409:

zerk.9701:

I still like windows 7 and have used both. It will be supported a long time you can still use XP.

XP is far behind Vista/7/8 in terms of features. As for 7 keeping up with 8, it’s already not getting DX 11.1. Really, getting an OS that’s a version old is just a foolish enterprise in any sense.

As for the build, there’s no reason to spend that much on an air cooler, go for water. Also, games are already taking advantage of more then 4 cores. Crysis 3 did, BF4 will. At this point in time, an i7 is looking like a good buy. For ram, there’s no reason not to go for 16 with that sort of budget. Even if it’s not really useful now, this sort of PC will easily last 5~7 years, when 16 gigs of ram will be nice.

To clear this up some here is crysis 3 note the performance of the lower clocked i5 3550 compaired to the hex core 3960x it’s a whopping 2 FPS that could be the differance in the clock speed.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/crysis-3-performance-benchmark-gaming,3451-8.html

For windows 8 alot of people like me hate it. Games are still made in directX 9 the last time I checked and from this they will move to direct X 10 but not higher for a long time. http://www.netquake.net/2012/11/no-directx-11-1-support-for-windows-7/

And again on the memory their no reason to spend the extra $ for 16GB of memory for a gaming PC By the time you will need more than 8GB you can upgrade to DDR4 or 5

The air cooler I listed if a very good cooler will perform close to the water at a lower noise level. Just because you have a budget of $1500 does not mean you need to spend it all to get a very good performing Gaming PC.

Zerk, i know u know more the average person when it comes to PC’s, but, i have to point out that the FPS figures ur comparing are ‘minimums’, which are HIGHLEY likely to be caused by the GPU maxing out in those super intense situations and/or are the result of loading spikes.
Yes minimums are VERY important when comparing performance, but as i said, they are usualy caused by 2 things, GPU and/or Loading spikes, its vary rare that they are affected by CPU unless ur in a CPU bound game like GW2.
Ether way if u look at the AVERAGE fps, there is a huge difference, 10-15 FPS, roughly 25%.

Folks above have made great recommendations for specific parts so I’ll just add a few things to keep in mind when building a system.
1} “infrastructure” is important.
a} That means don’t cheap out on a power supply best to avoid using the one that comes with the case. 650 watts and up from solid brands.
b} cooling is key. That includes both the guts(Processor, Hard disk and Graphics card) as well as the case itself. They’ve made good suggestions for processor coolers. When you price a graphics card don’t try to save $5 by getting one with a poor cooler. Lots of metal is a fair indicator. Pay no attention to cool art work or fancy lights. If they spent their budget on bling they likely skimped on cooling ability with smaller weaker fans or limited metal surface area. For case fans I personally prefer fewer larger fans with lower speeds than many small fan running like jet engines.
c}excepting water cooled systems which I wouldn’t recommend for some ones first build, cooling comes down to brute force surface area(increased by large chunks of finned metal and good thermal paste(“goldi-locks” neither too little nor too much) and fans forcing reasonably cool outside air across the metal.
c.1} keep your PC in as cool a room as possible. No reasonable cooling system can overcome a room that’s 40 degrees C. Basements are often a good choice if you have no problems with flooding.

2} choose a motherboard with some expansion slots preferably mostly PCI express. My own experience with even good brands of consumer boards is after a year or so you may have problems with onboard network ports and often onboard sound basically blows. Expansion slots let you add cards to cover the things motherboards rarely do well without having to gut your system in the future, and can be added in the future no need for them immediately. The sound may not be as much of an issue if you use a USB headset for hearing and talking.