Guild Wars 2

I recently got an 8 core PowerMac for an unbelievable price. I plan on upgrading the CPUs and the GPU soon. I know there are people who run games like WoW in Bootcamp and it’s reportedly great. Anyone able to provide some experiential input?

hey padreviejo,

I don’t know what components you are going to use for your upgrade but running bootcamp on mac works great usually.
Just switched back from the Mac Beta (it’s advertised as a beta but it is the windows GW2 in a wine wrapper) to Windows/bootcamp and it’s like day and night.
It’s really about you buying windows which is up to 2-6 times of what GW2 costs.

Since you have real graphics cards in there, it sure is worth thinking about it anyway.

Just to be sure, what specs does/will the powermac have? Maybe somebody heard of that specific configuration and problems with it.

Are you talking about the new one?

Just checking, are you sure you mean a PowerMac? They were discontinued in 2005 and run on PPC processors (as opposed to intel), so even if you replace the GPU and CPU I’m not sure the game will run incredibly well :S.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Just checking, are you sure you mean a PowerMac? They were discontinued in 2005 and run on PPC processors (as opposed to intel), so even if you replace the GPU and CPU I’m not sure the game will run incredibly well :S.

There’s no such thing as an “8 core Power Mac” so they must mean a Mac Pro.

I play in OS X on a 2009 2.66 GHz quad-core Mac Pro with Radeon 6870 GPU. Runs fine for me with fluff graphics, which I don’t care about, set low. Performance would be better in Bootcamp / Windows but I haven’t tried it.

An “8 core” Mac Pro could be older or newer than 2009.

Anything older than a 2009 model won’t run OS X 10.8 which is required for the Mac version of Guild Wars 2. However, an older Mac Pro could potentially run Windows well. I would be inclined to run Windows exclusively on an older Mac Pro if gaming was my interest.

Good point Todd. My comment can be disregarded then since the machine obviously isn’t a powermac.

yeah my bad. It’s a Mac Pro. 2009 model 8 core 2.26. Good to hear GW2 runs with a 2009 model single CPU, so mine with 2 ought to run as well. I ordered 2 3.0ghz quad core CPUs, and a GTX 680 for it. I have a Win 7 license from a laptop that met an ugly death, so I’m good there. It came with 2 sticks of 4GB RAM, and there are 4 slots open. I plan on getting 4 more 4GB sticks. Even after all that I still won’t be up to what one of these things goes for on eBay. Like I said, it was an unbelievable price.

I always wanted one of these, but I’ve built my own PCs for years and couldn’t see blowing that much money on one. So far, even without the upgrades installed, it’s an amazing machine and everything I thought it would be. Once I get the upgrades installed it’s going to be even better. I can’t wait. Next weekend’s project will be to install the upgrades, Windows 7, and see what happens :-) Will report back.

edit: I’m currently using a home built PC – Asus mobo, 16GB RAM, 3.0ghz 6 core, GTX 650, 500gb SSD.

btw – should I get an SSD for this? It looks like it will handle one nicley.

Unfortunately the GW2 OSX client does not benefit from either more CPU cores nor more RAM, but the speedbump to 3 GHz should help a little.
SSD doesn’t help with the framerate, but due to how the game world is split up into seperate maps, cutting down the loading times of those will improve your overall experience quite a bit.

Padreviejo.6283:

yeah my bad. It’s a Mac Pro. 2009 model 8 core 2.26. Good to hear GW2 runs with a 2009 model single CPU, so mine with 2 ought to run as well. I ordered 2 3.0ghz quad core CPUs, and a GTX 680 for it. I have a Win 7 license from a laptop that met an ugly death, so I’m good there. It came with 2 sticks of 4GB RAM, and there are 4 slots open. I plan on getting 4 more 4GB sticks. Even after all that I still won’t be up to what one of these things goes for on eBay. Like I said, it was an unbelievable price.

I always wanted one of these, but I’ve built my own PCs for years and couldn’t see blowing that much money on one. So far, even without the upgrades installed, it’s an amazing machine and everything I thought it would be. Once I get the upgrades installed it’s going to be even better. I can’t wait. Next weekend’s project will be to install the upgrades, Windows 7, and see what happens :-) Will report back.

edit: I’m currently using a home built PC – Asus mobo, 16GB RAM, 3.0ghz 6 core, GTX 650, 500gb SSD.

btw – should I get an SSD for this? It looks like it will handle one nicley.

Build it as a Windows only box and it should run well.

8 GB of RAM is more than adequate to play games. Pointless to add more. An SSD drive is also unnecessary for a gaming computer. The graphics card is where you want your money.