Guild Wars 2

Asus P6T Deluxe2 Motherboard
Intel i7 920 Stock (no overclocking)
24GB DDR3
256GB Boot SSD, 128GB storage SSD, 750GB HDD
AMD Radeon HD 6770 (doesn’t matter which driver rev I use, but currently on 13.1)

I can launch the game just fine, however after selecting a character, the game loads up and as soon as I appear in the world, the graphics driver has a heart attack followed by a stroke, and then either drops me back to the desktop or hard locks the system.

Guild Wars 2 is the ONLY game that does this. Other games tested on this PC have been Minecraft, Anno 2070, Train Simulator 2013, Rift, Portal 2, SupCom Forged Alliance.

CPU temps are fine – it’ll hit 55-60C under extreme load, including Prime95 overnight.
RAM is clocked BELOW spec (which according to support is what is wrong – seriously? The RAM is not running at its fully rated speed and there’s something wrong with that?) However the timings were running pretty tight as well. I dialed them back to 9-9-9-25 2T and the issue still occurs.

Heck, I thought it may have been Windows 8 that was part of the reason (one such instance of trying to run the game I received a little pop up that said “gw2.exe has been denied access to the graphics hardware”

Ok, no problem – I’ll try a fresh install of Windows 7.

So here I sit on a brand new install of Windows 7, NOTHING is installed, other than the AMD driver for the video card, a core chipset driver, and .NET 4.0 so that I could get into the display driver. I even installed the latest AMD application profile and rebooted.

Same exact freaking problem.

What in the world is going on here? Why is GW2 so sensitive about this?

My other PC is an AMD Phenom II X4 965 (overclocked to 4.0 GHz) 8GB of RAM and a Radeon HD 5870 and it has NONE of these issues, and it too was running Windows 8.

Try put the 5870 on that PC and see if it still occurs