Guild Wars 2

Hello

I am looking for a guide or must have specs when buying a laptop to run GW2 smoothly. I am mainly PvP and WvW if that helps.

Definitely get either an Intel core i5 with 4 cores and above 3 gigs, or a core i7 with at least dual core hyperthreading with at least 2.8 gigs when gaming. READ on the Intel Ark website about the CPU. You want at least 6 to 8 MB of Cache, and at least 4 CPU threads minimum. If you can get more than this, you are doing well. It will either be a Haswell CPU, or a Skylake CPU. Newer models will ship with Skylake.

You want at least 400 shader cores on the video card that has dedicated VRAM. If you can afford to get more, go get that. You should aim for one of the cards from Nvidia under the 900 series M, or if you want you can get one of the really good ones from AMD, which would be somebody elses advice. But please look up the specifications of the card, and make sure it is at least GDDR5 on the VRAM for the graphics card, dedicated. At least 400 shader cores. Try and get more than this.

Make sure the computer has 8 gigs of RAM, this is for system memory. If you go for less, you will regret.

Buy online for your purchase, and buy from a reputable company. You will save money so that you can get a better deal. If you buy from a retailer that has a physical store, expect physical store retail prices. If there is a sale, it’s probably a clearance sale, research the difference between the offerings of those laptops, and compare it to the laptops that are available now.

Please please please, look up the customer reviews of the laptop you are buying. This will save you heartache. Some laptop models have major issues, such as the hinge breaking on the monitor, the monitor dying, the hard drive dying, the sound dying, the keyboard dying, the case breaking apart like brittle plastic, overheating issues.

Please do not buy a Samsung laptop, they glue their computers together now, to save costs, but the end result is, serviceability will be a major disappointment. Imagine wanting to clean the cooling fans later on. Good luck doing it yourself, and very much good luck finding a technician who will want to touch a computer that was glued together.

Find out what the maximum resolution the laptop supports. If you are unable to find out, don’t touch it. It needs to at least be able to do 1080p these days (1920 × 1080).

Don’t.

Sorry but it’s like saying you want a vehicle to haul furniture but it has to be a roadster.

The notion of a gaming laptop is ludicrous in my opinion. Anything that’s decent would be large, heavy and have a battery life of an hour for gaming. That’s the exact opposite of what laptops are targeting, at least lightweight with a good battery life, which translates to a less powerful CPU and no discrete GPU, the opposite of what GW2 needs.

The next thing a potential buyer hamstrings himself is some equally ridiculously low price. I usually see “I want a $600 laptop that can play X at max settings”. And I wanted to be living on Mars by now but we don’t always get our pipe dreams.

That said, same rules apply for desktops as laptops. True quad core CPUs, Intel over AMD. On top of that, discrete GPU with GDDR5 memory rather than DDR3, faster spinning HD or an SSD. Notebookcheck is a site that ranks the myrid of laptop CPU and GPUs. Note that the desktop rule that i5 and i7 CPUs are true quad cores don’t apply for laptop CPUs. You will find what we would call a desktop i3, dual core with HT, as a low end laptop i7 CPU so look for the HQ/HK/MQ suffix on the CPU model. GW2 really runs better if you have more than two real cores.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmark-List.2436.0.html

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

After limiting your picks to relatively recent quad cores and GPUs (GTX 960m and up) then price depends on amount of RAM, VRAM, size and resolution of display (as well as display technology), SSD included or not, backlit/mech switch keyboard, etc. I think ASUS and MSI are generally the good brands.

You could use a site like NewEgg to filter the wheat from the chaff to a relative short list. That you could investigate further. It’s just with the money you will be spending you could get a much nicer desktop setup.

Um, I find the battery for gaming laptops to be incase I want to move locations in the house or somebody elses house. Otherwise I treat it as a mobile desktop. Of course if you decide to use the laptop as something other than gaming, it works quite well on battery.

Read about the problems with laptops and Nvidia gpus on this game under Windows 10 if I was you. If this game is the main reason you want to buy one. This still hasnt been fixed. There is a topic right next to yours where this is detailed “Nvidia drivers wont work on x64 bit client” and “Stuck loading map” and “texture corruption on nvidia mobile gpu”. I would tell you to search but the search function on this forum is terrible.

Aside from this problem a high spec gaming laptop will play the game great. The post by Loli is great, and mentioned what you should be aiming for, but you will pay a premium on a laptop compared to a much better performing desktop. If thats what you need then I highly recommend custom made laptops by Clevo/Sager for best bang for your buck/euro. Some of the latest MSI ones are great too, but are not so good cooling wise. This is the biggest concern, you want to keep temperatures down as much as possible. The 8 and 9 series Nvidia mobile gpus will do that. Im a massive Amd gpu fan as far as desktops go (price vs performance and their drivers are pretty good now in the main), but stay well away from them in laptops. That said….they dont have the problem the Nvidia ones do that I first mentioned but in general gaming terms they are not the preferable option. Hope this helps.