Guild Wars 2

I’m new to building PCs. My previous one died, and it was running GW2 at a pretty low framerate with the lowest settings. I WvW occasionally, but I mostly PvE. I’m looking for something that generally runs the game decently at high or max settings.

Here are the parts I have in mind:
CPU: i5-3570K
GPU: GTX 660
RAM: 8GB DDR3
Hard drive: SSD for OS and GW2
OS: Win 7 64-bit

I already have dual monitors at 1680×1050.

Questions:
1. Will this meet my needs?
2. Any suggestions for motherboard, case, and power supply?
3. Do I need extra cooling?

Thanks!

Yes this will meet your needs. Personally I recommend keeping GW2 on the HDD.
Also this seems to be a popular choice for regular gaming computers. It’ll max it for the most part with enjoyable frames.

Thanks Avelos. Why do you recommend keeping GW2 on the HDD?

Any suggestions for motherboard, case, or power supply?

ElenaDragon.8401:

Thanks Avelos. Why do you recommend keeping GW2 on the HDD?

Any suggestions for motherboard, case, or power supply?

No idea for a good motherboard, but I would stick with ASUS and Gigabyte since every motherboard I have bought from them has outlived the useful life of the processor tied to it.

Same goes for a case, I made the mistake of getting a Thermaltake V3 which is a mid-tower. I find that it is far too small for poking around inside the case.

As for a power supply, if you ever plan on expanding your computer to add another graphics card, you might want to grab something like a 750W power supply. If not, a 600W or so will do. Brands I recommend are Corsair and Seasonic.

Personally, I keep Guild Wars 2 on an older SSD (original OCZ Vertex series 30GB) and not on my fastest drive. I would rather use the space on my main drive for just the operating system and keeping the drive relatively empty for maximum performance.

However, in your case where there is just a hard drive and an SSD, I would toss the game on the SSD.

any case that will hold it all of course xD One with good air flow preferrably. I’d also recommend like kitten-700 watt power supply. a 650 watt will do it all just fine and give you breathing room for future upgrades such as a second 660 Ti if you wanted it.
Make a Corsair brand one or a Rosewill or Cooler Master. Cooler Master case too. I like their cases.

why I recommend keeping the game on the HDD over the SSD is longevitiy of the game. More writes will use up the life of the game but I’m paranoid about keeping my SSD last long so I just have small basic things on it like OS and browser and other small programs and such. I didn’t have any noticeable performance increase on the SSD even at loading screens, so.

Thanks Ilithis and Avelos for the feedback!

Here’s a case I found yesterday that looks pretty good:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0055Q7BR4/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

I’m probably going with a 650W power supply. Still looking at motherboards.

I hadn’t thought about the lifetime of the SSD, but that is something I will keep in mind.

GW2 is on my SSD and I am not worried about writes since the longevity of the SSD is very very long. By the time I see degradation I will probably have a 2TB SSD. I do notice load times increase as well from my 3tb internal back up.
Corsair and Cooler Master are fairly good makes as well.