Guild Wars 2

I want to preface this by saying that I am on a tight budget and I know you hear that all the time, but we are a family of three living off of my wife’s disability pay while I am her full-time caregiver due to her multiple sclerosis.

Recently, the PCI-E slot on my 680i apparently burned out. Thankfully, I have a lifetime warranty on this 680i and EVGA is replacing the board. They unfortunately are unable to replace it with a socket 775 board because well they don’t make them anymore. So they are sending me their P67 SLI board instead. Which means that I have to replace the cpu, ram and dvd burner (mine is a ide burner).

This is what I will be purchasing for those parts.

For the CPU: Intel Pentium G860 Sandy Bridge 3.0GHz LGA 1155 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics

For the RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 × 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666)

I know that the DVD burner really doesn’t matter as far as overall performance goes.

The above parts will go with my BFG 9800 GTX+ 512MB Video Card and my OCZ 650 Watt Power Supply.

The games that I play are generally MMOs, Skyrim and I just purchased Guild Wars 2 (haven’t had the chance to play as of yet because my PCI-E slot went down the day after I purchased, installed and registered the game.

The system that this new set-up is replacing was the 680i, with 4GB of G.Skill DDR2 Ram, the 9800 GTX+ vid card and the same power supply. It ran anything that I threw at it and while maybe not on the highest settings, I could manage medium-high settings and was very happy.

Will this new set-up be able to compete with the old set-up?

I am trying to get my best bang for the buck that I have which is $150 to spend. Did I do alright?

Graphics wise GW2 isnt that harsh, u can easily set the settings to medium. However the CPU on the other hand will struggle. GW2 is INCREDIBILY cpu intensive.

Just to give u an idea. World vs World vs World in GW2 has battles of between 50-150 people at a time, only the very best CPU’s with a OC can keep FPS above 30. You will likely see very low FPS with that CPU in such situations.

You pritty much NEED a 4 core CPU (a 2nd or 3rd gen i5/i7 or a AMD FX 8XXX) . The G860 is only dual core and will bottleneck very quikly with GW2.

Look at this link
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

You idealy want a CPU that rates at 1800 or above for a Intel rig.

GW2 is NOT budget freindly, if u do stay with the rig u described expect poor performance. GW2’s advertised minimum requirments mean precisly kitten.

I must stay with this set-up as mentioned in my OP.

I guess I will just have to deal with it as is.

SolarNova.1052:

Graphics wise GW2 isnt that harsh, u can easily set the settings to medium. However the CPU on the other hand will struggle. GW2 is INCREDIBILY cpu intensive.

Just to give u an idea. World vs World vs World in GW2 has battles of between 50-150 people at a time, only the very best CPU’s with a OC can keep FPS above 30. You will likely see very low FPS with that CPU in such situations.

You pritty much NEED a 4 core CPU (a 2nd or 3rd gen i5/i7 or a AMD FX 8XXX) . The G860 is only dual core and will bottleneck very quikly with GW2.

Look at this link
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

You idealy want a CPU that rates at 1800 or above for a Intel rig.

GW2 is NOT budget freindly, if u do stay with the rig u described expect poor performance. GW2’s advertised minimum requirments mean precisly kitten.

Maybe I’m missing something because I am looking at this:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Pentium+G860+%40+3.00GHz

and it gets a rating of 2879 and is ninth overall in performance.

I have been doing a bit more research and it seems this processor is a workhorse and does very well with modern games, including GW2. I’m not looking for superior quality in looks, just want it to play the game.

Your on high – mid end chart. You should look at the High end only chart, the figures go up to 15,000 Notice that the G860 isnt even on that chart becouse it doesnt rank that high.

Also those charts are overall performance. GW2 takes most its performance from single threads, so u need to look at the single thread performance chart (the one i linked).

Im not saying it wont work with GW2, i just highly suspect that any CPu intensive area ike dynamic events, Lion Arch, and WvW will suffer greatly due to it only being Dual core and being overall relativly slow per thread. So just be prepaired..i would rather paint a grim picture and have u be pleasently surprised, than to sing its praise and u be dissapointed.

SolarNova.1052:

Your on high – mid end chart. You should look at the High end only chart, the figures go up to 15,000 Notice that the G860 isnt even on that chart becouse it doesnt rank that high.

Also those charts are overall performance. GW2 takes most its performance from single threads, so u need to look at the single thread performance chart (the one i linked).

Im not saying it wont work with GW2, i just highly suspect that any CPu intensive area ike dynamic events, Lion Arch, and WvW will suffer greatly due to it only being Dual core and being overall relativly slow per thread. So just be prepaired..i would rather paint a grim picture and have u be pleasently surprised, than to sing its praise and u be dissapointed.

Ok… that makes more sense.

I wish I could afford a better system, but this is all I have to work with.