Guild Wars 2

How will this run the game? I am a CPU building noobie and still learning.

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($199.99)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($29.99 @ Microcenter)
Motherboard: ASRock Z87 Extreme4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($104.99)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 × 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($66.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 830 Series 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (Purchased For $0.00)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($59.98 @ Outlet PC)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card ($203.98 @ Newegg)
Wireless Network Adapter: TP-Link TL-WDN4800 802.11a/b/g/n PCI-Express x1 Wi-Fi Adapter ($34.99 @ Microcenter)
Case: NZXT Phantom 410 (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case ($79.99 @ Microcenter)
Power Supply: Rosewill Capstone 650W 80 PLUS Gold Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($89.99)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer ($18.48 @ Outlet PC)

yes this rig will play the game but i have some advices .

1. if you can effort to buy a 750 watt psu it will be better because you will add to pc more hard drives than one and an external wifi that needs extra power. also in 2nd paragraph i suggest to buy a audio pci card that needs power too

2. also you don’t have include a pci audio card . if you don’t want have any problems in- game ( special in zerg fights ) i suggest to include an extra audio card in you busket . you can read in my thread how much important is the audio for this game ( and all games ) https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p/first#post2636642

for me is better for this game to buy a cheaper vga and buy an extra pci audio card than stay with the on-board audio chip . your i5 will perform better

3. take a look in all of my advices https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p/first#post2640737

4. playing with a wifi connection is not recommended but i have tested and i can say that with a good wifi card and good connection with the router the game goes well but i see in comments in newegg (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704133) that people had problems with the small distance of this wifi card. if you are close to router it is ok , but if you are far away from it be sure take a different wifi card

if you don’t need to connect thru wifi then drop the wifi adapter. also, if you can get a better cooler, do so. haswell chips tend to get hot especially when overclocking.

when are you planning to build this? the 9000 series is just around the corner.

Don’t listen to Reborn about the 750W PSU. The 650W one is more than enough.

Also don’t listen to his recommendation to buy a cheaper graphics card and to use the savings to buy an extra pci audio card. The game will never use more than 25% of that CPU’s resources so the resources used by the onboard audio will not impact performance whatsoever.

If you can, get a wired connection. Wired is much more stable than wireless.

650w is enough for a haswell bassed rig (haswell is the architecture name of the CPU you have selected, they are really power efficient)
You DONT need a dedicated soundcard, onboard is fine. You only get a dedicated sound card if ur a audiophile/have a really good sound system to support
You DONT need a newtowrk card, the motherboard has one onboard. Though it is wired. Wired is best anyway, and tbh it isnt hard to route a network lead around the house if need be. I got my own wire coming from the back room ,where the modem/route is bassed, up into the upstars backroom (through the floor) where my rig is.

If you can, try get 1866 or 2133 or 2400 mhz RAM. RAM is now available in much faster speeds and so the lower speeds have gotten cheaper. 1600mhz is standard but you can get faster ones now for a good price. Also CPU’s nowerdays love fast speeds over tight timings so a CL10 or CL 2400mhz RAM kit will be MUCH better than a CL8 or CL9 1600mhz kit. How much that affects game performance is arguable, it wont be much, but for other processes it will help.

See if u can get samsungs new 840 Evo SSD, it has the perfomance of a 840 Pro for a cheaper price.

The faster memory will have a minor impact on performance but costs a lot more.

I personally use 1866 Corsair Dominator Platinum CL9. Great stuff.

The biggest concern I have atm is my cooler. I don’t plan on overclocking, mainly because I don’t know how to, and don’t want to screw anything up. If I don’t overclock is my cooler good enough? If I do decide to overclock, what would be a good, cost efficient answer to my cooling problems? I will be using the onboard sound card for now, thks for the advice. I also know that playing wired is preferred but my router is about 20 or 30 ft away threw a wall so yeah, and I am not exactly proficient at finding a way to bring a wire threw that distance without it being noticed.

Yes the evo is plenty fine. Considering that you are hesitant oc’ing as is I doubt you would push your oc to a point where the evo wouldn’t be able to handle it.

Powerline might be an option to look at if your wifi signal turns out to be inconsistent.

Galandor.

Drill through the wall in the bottom corner by the scurtingboard. thats how my house has all the upstairs rooms with network wired. Do it somwhere where you have a unit or some sort, so its hidden.
And you can buy long network cables for cheap.
but if u must then i guess wireless is the only option.
If u ever have a signal problem, look into plug boosters. (homeplug/powerline)
Bassicaly u plug the main unit into a plug next to the modem/router, and connect it by network cable like normal.
The data uses the wires in the house plug system. A seperate wireless plug unit plugs into a plug in the room ur rig is, u then use a normal wireless reciever on ur PC to recive it from the signal transmited from the plug unit. Again i have these in my house for use with laptops and such. The ones i have are done by Solwise.

Even if ur not OCing, a 212 Evo is a good choice, the stock coolers that come with the cpu’s are rather naff tbh.
If u did decide to OC, then the 212 Evo will be enough for a small OC, but haswell (4670k and 4770k) are REALLY hot running CPU’s when OC’d so u would want some top end air cooling (like NH-D14 or SilverArrow) or a Corsair H100i AIO water cooler or somthing simular to properly OC.

My H100i never lets my CPU get past 70c with my oc and I have the fans on quiet mode. I love the Corsair Link software as well.

Yea a H100i for a Ivy bridge is great. But haswell is hotter, for example a h100i will strugle at keeping at 4770k cool at around 4.5ghz depending on the voltage required.

By strugle i mean it will likely hit 80c under full load.

I was looking at the h100i and it looks huge, will it fit in a mid tower phantom case?

Yes. Any space in the Phatom 410 that has room for 2x 120mm fans will fit the H100i rad.
I beleve the 410 has room in the top for 2 fans and thus thats where the rad would sit with 2 fans on it. Maybe 4 in push pul lconfig if u have room.

http://www.vortez.net/articles_pages/nzxt_phantom_410_review,9.html

Read the bit about the rad.
A thin rad like the h100i has would fit.

If you don’t plan to overclock, the Evo is fine and is much better than the stock Intel cooler. If you ever overclock the Evo just isn’t going to hold up much past 4-4.2GHz. It’s just a matter of heat dissipation and the Evo can’t keep up, Haswell heats up fast once you have to bump the voltage up for OCing.

The CoolerMaster 612 and 812 will handle the thermal load better than the 212 Evo and are both cheaper than the H100i but they aren’t as gamer sexy as a 240mm radiator liquid cooling system.

Don’t see a problem with anything on your list other than the debate on the CPU cooler.

As for the question of if an H100i will fit in the Phantom 410. One with the radiator inside and the fans outside and one with the fans inside and the radiator outside the chassis.

i am seeing we have “serious” debate here ….

at OP . you must decide what type of pc you are going build . an office desk pc or a gamer pc ?

since you will use a cpu and a mobo that are both unlocked for over-clocking i am sure the first thing that you will do inside the first month is to go to bios and start pushing further you cpu ….

maybe it will not in the first month but for sure it will be in the first year when you will try a game and you will see that you can not play it without lag in medium settings !

this moment is when you will need a real good cooler fan for the cpu .

so i agree with Behellagh.1468 that propose a better cpu fan ( no need to be a water-cooler , there are some normal fan that someone can over-clock the cpu and he will have acceptable temperatures and without problems . check this disxussion : http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/271218-29-overclock-2500k-0ghz-stock-cooling .

and now to psu … first of all the psu facts

1. the psu effeciency of each psu is not 100% . this is why each psu has a label ( platinum , gold , bronze etc ) . what that means ? read it you and everyone that want to learn something new . everything explained in this excellent article from the corsair’s site http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/80-plus-platinum-what-does-it-mean-and-what-is-the-benefit-to-me .
from this article 3 tables :
[pre]

table 1. wattage in different usage .

Mode Hours Wattage
Power Saver Mode 2 hours 50W
Sleep Mode 4 hours 5W
Normal usage 8 hours 200W
Gaming 2 hours 600W

table 2 .Below are the different 80 PLUS levels and the efficiency requirements for each level:

20% load 50% load 100% load
80 PLUS 80% 80% 80%
80 PLUS Bronze 82% 85% 82%
80 PLUS Silver 85% 88% 85%
80 PLUS Gold 87% 90% 87%
80 PLUS Platinum 90% 92% 89%

table 3 . In the following example, we’re going to look at a 500W power supply putting out 250W (50%) of its power:

DC Output AC Input Efficiency Watts Lost
PSU that meets
minimum ATX
efficiency requirements 250W 416W 60% 166W
Typical low cost PSU 250W 357W 70% 107W
80 PLUS PSU 250W 312.5W 80% 62.5W
80 PLUS Bronze PSU 250W 294W 85% 44W
80 PLUS Silver PSU 250W 284W 88% 34W
80 PLUS Gold PSU 250W 278W 90% 28W
80 PLUS Platinum 250W 272W 92% 22W

[/pre]
so from table 1 . a psu is not a lamp that you turn it on an consume standard watts … it is floating from the pc usage ;)

and what usage will be yours ? only office and browsing in facebook ? NO NO ….GAMING !!!

end part 1 , > part 2 below

and of course the OP will go many times in www or a zerg farm trains and he will play for hours every day and he will want to have open browser in the background to read the wiki and his facebook and fraps to video the game and a camera to stream it in twitch and a smart-phone plugged in a usb and a printer/scanner or any usb device that has !!!!

now the table 2 and 3 .

we are see that in a gold psu ( like OP post ) for 250 watt it loose 28 watt . his cpu has average TDP 87 watt in idle and average 150 watt in full load ( source : http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/06/12/intel-core-i5-4670k-haswell-cpu-review/6 ) . the vga has 250 watt in full load .

someone can say . there is no problem at all. it will have 313 watt spare . yes if a pc had only a cpu and a gpu . a pc has more parts that need power too . how can we calculate them ?

there is a site that many who build pc for people using it to calculate the psu for each
and now the calculation ….

the link is this : http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

if we put all the parts that OP want to start , it returns a 650 watt , but if someone oc it to 1,3 volt and 4.0 ghz that his cpu can reach easy the extra wattage are 107 watts .

so for a our situation we have a cpu oc-ed + gpu =~ 450 watt and the 650 watt gold psu give in the first year the pc a whole ~200 watt for everything else ( motherborad , dvdrom , wifi card , usb devices etc … )

So ,the question is …. Author . how often you want to buy new psu ? because if you want next years buy a new one it is ok to go for a 650 watt , but if you want to stay with it for a long time ( in 3-4 years you will want change the vga or buy one more 7950 for sli ) ….. take a bigger psu because of aging .in the end of the psu calculator page has two more facts about psu.

• ** Recommended UPS rating is based on the selected components only and does not include monitor, printer or any other electronic devices that are not a part of the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator.

• 4 Electrolytic capacitor aging. When used heavily or over an extended period of time (1+ years) a power supply will slowly lose some of its initial wattage capacity. We recommend you add 10-20% if you plan to keep your PSU for more than 1 year, or 20-30% for 24/7 usage and 1+ years.

others said don’t buy extra audio card and that i dont know what i am saying because the new new i5 has enough power …blah , blah ….

i will say only these three and i will close it here.:

• i am sure you are not read my thread with photos where i am playing the game in a 7 years AMD cpu without lag inside full zergs in www https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/7-years-old-PC-without-LAG-in-WWW-1080p/first#post2636642 .

read it and explain how a 7 years AMD cpu can play the game without any lag and with decent fps and perform ( has the same fps ) when i am playing with -nosound line argument or with dedicated audio card and dropped with lag spikes when i am playing it with onboard

• the new ps4 will have dedicated audio chip … they are fool and you are right …. “sure”

• i have a friend that has in a case level 10 a small “beast” , i7 ,oced , 16 gb ram , 2 sli 670 and he bought a new creative audio card. he is playing an elemental and now he is listening the thieves footsteps behind him …….. with the old pci card or the onboard he didn’t listen anything like that ….

so the new dedicated audio pci card opened new in-game features and this is valuable for a gamer

Reborn.2934:

PSU snip

What? You made that way more complicated than it needed to be and I think you got yourself lost in the process.

For the OP a gold 650w (that rosewill capstone is nice) will be more than fine for years upon years.

Here’s my quick and dirty method for guesstimating PSU size. CPU thermal wattage, double if OCing + max video card wattage + 50 watts and then multiply the whole thing by either 1.5 or 2. So i5-4670K is 84 watts, double to 168 watts, the HD 7950 is 200 watts max so this yields roughly 630-840 watts.

The PSU lite calculator suggests that your system as listed even with a 1.3v 4.4GHz overclock and 30% cap age … drum roll please … 505 watts. So 650 watt is fine and dandy. Only reason to go bigger is if you know you will be getting a 2nd HD 7950 at some point.

Fortunately once you get into PSUs of this size, the modern ones can provide nearly all that power at 12 volts, important because the two biggest power users in a rig is the CPU and the video card and they “feed” on the 12 volt portion of the PSU. Less than 50 watts peak of 3.3V + 5V is used nowadays.

@Reborn – The rated wattage of a PSU is in DC watts. Efficiency is based on DC watts/AC watts. A PSU with a 92% efficiency at say 250 DC watts means on the AC side of things it’s using 272 watts of AC power with 22 watts loss and likely radiated as heat. The loss isn’t on the DC side. A 650 watt (continuous) PSU will produce up to 650 watts of DC power regardless of it’s efficiency. It’s just that a 70% efficient PSU will draw 929 watts of AC power to deliver that 650 watts of DC power instead of 722 watts with an 80+ Gold rated PSU. It saves on the power bill, lower carbon footprint, green blah blah eco friendly blah.

Also that bit-tech article you linked to about power use of an i5-4670K. That’s an entire PC measure at the wall socket, so AC wattage. Their test system uses a 80+ Gold PSU and includes a GTX 680. This means that even at worse case the entire system, not just the CPU, while running a Prime95 smallfft is using 150 watts on the AC side of things. On the DC side of things is only using 138 watts, likely a few watts less since it’s below the 20% of their 850 watt PSU so efficiency suffers.

ok i just read this article that this vga needs 339 watts in full load

source : http://www.techspot.com/review/496-amd-radeon-7950/page9.html

so the calculations now is in full load both :

1 . not oc-ed cpu + gpu = 504 watts

2. oc-ed ( 1,3v + 4.0ghz ) cpu + gpu = 611 watts

good luck OP with the 650 watt psu . when you will try other games that need 100% of the cpu and the 100% of gpu like crysis 3 then the luck and the GOD will be the only help

crysis 3 i5 3570k cpu usage ( cry-i5 )
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/366455-28-3570k-bottlenecking-crysis
i5 3570k vs i5 4670k
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4670K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-3570K

and
crysis 3 fps results with hd radeon 7950
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/crysis_3_graphics_performance_review_benchmark,7.html

I hate keeping on bout this but when someone else might be taking this to heart then I feel we must.

If you read that article then you would note it says “SYSTEM power consumption” not GPU power consumption. So that means everything listed in their test system used 339 watts.

Just look at the attachment above….SYSTEM

Reborn.2934:

ok i just read this article that this vga needs 339 watts in full load

source : http://www.techspot.com/review/496-amd-radeon-7950/page9.html

so the calculations now is in full load both :

1 . not oc-ed cpu + gpu = 504 watts

2. oc-ed ( 1,3v + 4.0ghz ) cpu + gpu = 611 watts

good luck OP with the 650 watt psu . when you will try other games that need 100% of the cpu and the 100% of gpu like crysis 3 then the luck and the GOD will be the only help

crysis 3 i5 3570k cpu usage ( cry-i5 )
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/366455-28-3570k-bottlenecking-crysis
i5 3570k vs i5 4670k
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4670K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-3570K

and
crysis 3 fps results with hd radeon 7950
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/crysis_3_graphics_performance_review_benchmark,7.html

System power. That’s the whole system, CPU (an i7-3960X hex core stock clock), motherboard, ram (4 sticks), video card, drive (SSD), measured at the wall, running Crysis 2. Go to page 2 of that article to see the system specs. They are using a huge 1250w 80+ Gold PSU so it’s only using maybe 315 watts of DC power for that system.

If the card uses as much power as you seem to think then why would AMD list under requirements only a 500 watt PSU with 2 PCIe 6-pin connectors?

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/7000/7950/Pages/radeon-7950.aspx#2

I know the whole issue about sizing a PSU is confusing. Few sites actually measure power going into a video card or the VRM for the CPU/RAM so they report on the entire system as measured at the wall. TechPowerUp measures just the card.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/HD_7950/25.html

here’s an overclocked HD 7950

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_7950_Vapor-X/26.html

That’s one reason the PSU calculator is popular but can still be slightly confusing with all the options.

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

I still liberally throw some extra wattage on it’s results just to be safe.

uhhhh huh, yeah, so basically I have no idea what is really being said other than, one guy is saying I need to buy a bigger PSU and 2 others are saying he is wrong, whom to believe o.O

You should believe the people who actually have experience in such matters. A 650W psu is fine for that build.

The reason people tend to think they need huge power supplies, is too often review websites quote power consumption “measured at the wall”, and people interpret that as how large their PSU needs to be.

What people need to realize is, PSU’s are rated for the power they deliver, not the power they consume. That rating is expressed as, for example, 650w at 80% efficiency.

If you measure the power draw at the wall, you’re also measuring the 20% that’s lost as heat, which means that a 650w at 80% efficiency power supply will draw up to 800w.

Also there was a time when the power demands for video cards switched from 5 volts to 12 volts. Unfortunately that left power supply manufacturers with a lot of power supplies that could deliver a lot of it’s wattage at 3.3 and 5 volts and not as much at 12 volts which was mainly used just by the CPU, drives and case fans.

It was too easy to find say a 450 watt power supply that could only deliver 216 watts at 12 volts. Compare that to the 384 watts a modern Corsair CX430 can deliver at 12 volts. And because of that video card companies started to request very large power supplies simply to reduce the chance of a PSU not providing enough watts to power their cards. They later included a “amps at 12 volts” in some of their requirements just to be clear what they were hoping for.

Actually a lot of those older designed power supplies are alive and well in store bought PCs (looking at you HP). Which is fine because 80% of their customers won’t ever crack the case open much less than add a video card, hard drive or more RAM.

So going back to Reborn’s article and chart, that HD 7950 in a rig playing Crysis 2 at 1920×1200 at Dx11 ultra quality used 339 watts at the wall socket. Ignoring PSU efficiency and simply doubling it to 678 watts should indicate that a modern 650 watt PSU, which that Rosewill is, is plenty to get the job down with plenty of slack and putting it’s usage near the 80plus 50% sweet spot for efficiency.

So basically what you are all saying is, I don’t need to go up to a 750 watt.

That’s right. 650 watt is more than enough for one HD 7950 even with an overclocked i5-4670K.

galandor.1059:

So basically what you are all saying is, I don’t need to go up to a 750 watt.

Way more than enough, I would be shocked in all truth if this build used more than 400W. My system, now with 4 more HDD’s, a WCed loop for the GPU and a pretty good OC on the GPU as well, pulls about 408W from my UPS (you can think of this as wall wattage), that’s while running IBT, kombustor and a few programs to load the HDD’s, which makes the computer draw more power than it ever will under normal use.

The down side today is people often way over buy PSU’s, and end up getting crappy brands/models that cause problems, which only (for them at least) proves they need even more power, when really all they needed was a well built 500W PSU.

It is not watts you need to worry about, it is amp draw, what has been stated about amp draw on a given rail is true and is why GPU mfg’s now suggest rather large PSU’s for a given card, they shoot really high because they know on a PSU that size it should have at least the amp capacity needed. The rig you want is probably close to around 28-29 amps on the 12v rail.

There are a number of PSU calculators online that will give you and idea of what you really need.
eg. this one — http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

The main thing with a PSU is to get a good quality one that is efficient, well-made and supplies reliable voltages.

Two things stood out for me in your original spec.

1- 128GB Samsung SSD. Personally, I wouldn’t go for less than 256 GB. I think you will fill a 128GB too fast.

Guild Wars on its own takes 17GB approx.

Samsung make good SSDs. They are probably the fastest overall. But, there are plenty of other good makes too.

2- RAM of 8GB. I would go for 2×8GB sticks. RAM really is pretty cheap these days.

As far as RAM speed goes. Faster RAM is always better. But, really fast RAM is only needed if you want a high overclock.

I usually buy in the middle speed range. It doesn’t usually cost much more than the cheapest RAM and you do have ability to overclock.

If you don’t overclock then you won’t notice any difference between the slowest and fastest RAM.

Btw- with that CPU and graphics card combo, GW2 should scream along on high settings and high resolution.

High settings? Disappointing, I was hoping for ultra o.O

Well theres a reason there are more expenive higher performing GPU’s above the 7950 :P

The settings u wont be able to max out will only be 2 things.
1 of them becouse its bugged. The other becouse its a GPU hog.

Reflections: All< This is the one thats bugged. Set it to Terrain and Sky.
Sampling: SuperSampling < This requirs alot of GPU power. Set to Native.

The rest of the setitngs can be maxed.
With the eception of Cullign settings. These can not both be maxed becouse they are CPU bassed.
CharacterLimit: High/Highest
texture Limit: Medium/Low

By ‘High Settings’ – I meant at the upper end of playing the game.

‘Ultra’ is just every graphic setting turned up to max.

But, you don’t need everything turned up to max.

There are many GPU settings that can be lowered and make almost no diff.

^ what SolarNova says..:)

There are only a couple of setting that are “Ultra” or “Highest”. The default “Best Appearance” is pretty nice all by itself.