Guild Wars 2

Alright, I’m trying to locate the bottleneck within my laptop PC. I figure it’s my CPU, but I’m not entirely sure, and I don’t know how much an upgrade would effect my FPS. Here are my current specs.

Model: Alienware M15x
OS: Windows 8 Home Premium
CPU: Intel i3 M330 @ 2.13 GHz (2 cores, 4 threads)
GPU: nVidia GeForce 460M (1.5GB)
RAM: 4GB (Not sure of the model/specs, but I doubt this is causing an issue anyways)

All graphics drivers are up to date, and running temperatures seem normal. CPU usage never goes above 80% according to Windows Task Manager. Typically in WvW my FPS drops to 10 and under in big battles, 20 and lower in world boss battles, stable 45-60 in low population areas… maybe as low as 30 when farming events in Orr, or in LA. Load times have been horrendous, sometimes taking 3+ minutes to load into a high population area like LA or a world boss’ location like Claw of Jormag.

Any recommendations would be extremely appreciated. I will be at work for the next few hours, so apologies if I don’t immediately respond.

in windows 7 – I know we have a feature called “Performance information and tools” that will do a benchmark on your system and compare it to other systems – this will give you an overview of the strongest and weakest parts of your system = I don’t have windows 8 so I wouldn’t know how they do it there, but I’m sure you have it also.
It will also give you suggestions on simple ways to improve performance.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/get-computer-speed-and-performance-information