First we need to know what display are planning to get as that will also be the resolution which your video card should be able to handle. Second you will need to to remember a laptops advantage are mobility meaning that you have integrated keyboard, mouse and speaker for sound and other external devices that now might want to re-consider to upgrade at the same time.
A good keyboard and mouse can make a large difference for how you play GW2 with reasonable large (physical) display you will be able to see more detail that you might not be able on a laptop screen. For sound you can get stand alone speakers (minimum 5.1 surround system) or headset with external sound card (usb) (7.1 virtual surround sound isn’t that bad) which will make you feel more surrounded by the game environment.
GTX 960 is an entry level video card and I have GTX 970 which work well with this game at 2560 × 1080 pixel on a 29 inch display without getting to extreme range for price vs power. I would recommend you to read up on tech sites that benchmark (=test) video card to get an impression of what to expect from what is on market now. AMDs newest series of video card seem to be better then last generation, but AMD R9 290X was in the same range (both price and performance) as GTX 970 when I bought my own video card. What is important to look for are fans on GPU for cooling as those can be noisy when they ran at max speed (it is here you will see the main difference between a “cheap” brand and a more expensive as bot Nvidia and AMD make reference design which other vendors can change a bit with better power regulator on GPU and cooling solutions.)
I suppose your goal will be relative soundless computer? Then invest in a processor cooler and don’t go cheap with standard cooling from Intel or AMDs OEM. Get kitten for you both your OS and GW2 (minimum 250-256 GB) and later buy a larger HD or another SSD for storage. That way you will avoid to have to move OS to SSD in the future and will have a very silent system (only fans from case, CPU and GPU will be moving) while playing GW2.
Do not get a dual core Intel today for a stationary computer!
You would want to have a quad (four real core) Inten i5 at least to be able to run both OS, game and other things in the back ground. AMDs CPU have design which make them share some resources on processor which make them less optimal in single threaded application like GW2. If you don’t believe me, then search on Internet for how well FX 8320/8350/8370 (the only thing different between these are standard clock) are running against intels i5 4690K (look what kind of clock are being used more then SKU for both FX and i5). Hyper threading (meaning one core produce two threads) on i7 are the only difference from i5.
Something to consider here is that AMD FX series strong point would be if you plan of working with editing (actually re-encoding) large chunks of video (which is also a situation where Hyper Threading from Intel i7 would out perform i5 – on the same clock between i5 vs i7), but both AMD and Nvida nowadays provide integrated chips for encoding on their video cards. If you would want to record your game play in GW2 with Nvidia you would not need an i7 to do that as an example, and neither GPU or CPU will be bogged down from recording thanks to the support of NVENC chip. I am sure that AMD also have the same kind of encoding support to offload GPU and CPU for recoding game play on their latest generation (AMD R9 and newer).
In general start in the right end before buying a ready made system. List what you have for devices you want to connect, what kind of usage and what kind of budget you have!
