Guild Wars 2

I’m trying to look for a good setup to play this game and other games smoothly, but as my interest lies with this game i was hoping that someone could rate this setup from 1/10 for gw2 and if you think i could upgrade a part please share it with me.

Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40 GHz
Asus Motherboard P8H77-V LE
AMD Radeon HD 7870 XT jokerCard 2GB
Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3-1600 Dual-Kit
Cooler Master K-350 Advanced 3.0
1000 GB SataIII Harddrive

8.5/10

If you WvW, you can overclock that CPU and get decent frames (30), even in the largest of battles.

Other than that, all I see missing is an SSD, which is really only for load times.

8/10, you are missing SSD for Windows / GW2 files.

This one is fine for that purpose, and cheap as chips:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227737

Other SSDs which are faster or offer more space are available.

Other than that, could not really improve much.

But what does SSD actually do and is it a part you cant miss or can u easily live without it?

U can live without it if u can stand long map change load times, personally i don’t, but if by performance u mean only Frames per sencod then SSD is totally irrelevant, u will get the same performace.

So long as u OC that CPu to ‘around’ 4.5ghz which u can do using air cooling (not expensive) u can play GW2 pritty much as godo as can be atm.

As the others have said a SSD would be nice but if ur on a budget its not somthing that is neccesery. If u do want one i sugest a 120gb one at minimum for ur OS and main games leaving atleast 20% free space for performance.
The Plextor m5 comes to mind, its got good performance and reliability. I would NOT sugest a OCZ SSD, they have a higher failure rates due to the type of memory they uses(unless they finaly changed it).

My crappy HDD with slow read / writes loads GW just fine. Map loads take anywhere from 5-15 seconds at most. No need for SSD and you probably don’t have to OC that CPU any either.

wana get better load times without buying an ssd?

buy 32gb ram and download fancycache give your games drive 24gb cache, fancycache will cache all gw2 files to ram and load them from ram, to ram, making load times faster then even the fastest ssd, this also will effect any other games on the same drive.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html

another good option on top of the above is a 500gb momentus XT they are cheap on amazon.

or a white lable velociraptor hdd
http://www.goharddrive.com/VelociRaptor-10000RPM-Hard-Drive-s/220.htm

http://stores.ebay.com/goHardDrive-Wholesale-and-Retail/600GB-/_i.html?rt=nc&_fsub=3686859012&_sid=270414522&_sticky=1&_trksid=p4634.c0.m14&_sop=15&_sc=1

those are the same people ebay sometimes has better prices then their normal online store.

they have 600gb vraps for 80bucks shipped that would be my buy over an ssd..infact my next plan is 4 of those hooked to my LSI based raid card

http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/romex-fancycache-review-ssd-performance-at-13gbs-and-765000-iops-in-60-seconds-flat/

check out that review if you wonder about the use of fancycache and why I love having 32gb ram.

MomentusXT is no match for a SSD, velociraptor is even worst, what u want from an SSD is not high read/write speeds only, what really matters is the low reading latency and ultra fast seek times, using memory as ramdisk is an ok idea but it is kinda not as practical as having a good SSD with the OS and games on it, it loads everything ultra fast, it is just a diferent league from any HDD.

Puting 2 standard HDD’s into Raid 0 also helps. Hell i run my storage drives in raid0 just for kicks lol.
So if u want 1 TB of space, get 2x 500gb ones and Raid0 them , u will get the 1TB space but with more speed, all u have to do is put up with loosing HDD space inside ur case.

but yea the main advnatage of SSD and RAM cacheing is access times. But if ur tight on money dont worry about it ..just get a standard HDD or 2 smaller ones and Raid0 them.

2xvraps come very close to ssd perf, check around for he reviews, this is even more true if you use a real raid card rather then onboard chipsets or cheap software raid cards.

momentusXT’s in raid are excellent as well, I setup a raid5 for a friend recently with 4 of them in a thermalright 4in1(4 2.5" drives in 1 5.25 bay) capacity of 3 drives with 1 drives worth of space used for redundancy. its faster then the high end ssd we tested it against and storage is far better( 256gb vs 1.5tb) read and write speeds are faster as well.

what you fail to do is read the review of fancycache, it uses ram to buffer read/write operations to/from hdd, in effect creating a hybrid drive situation, the faster the drives below the cache the better but, the ram is still far far faster then any ssd or hdd.

2×600gb vraps in raid0 with 32gb ram in the system 16-24gb of that caching data from the raid volume would lead to far better perf then any ssd can offer with far better capacity then any ssd can offer to boot.

if you swing 4×600gb vraps in raid 0 same ram used for fancycache……talk about speed…..and nice storage space to boot(i would keep an active backup of data on this raid on a 2-3tb hdd for redundancy tho)

the nice thing about the ram caching, is, 32gb can be had pretty cheap if you look around and watch the sales….i paid around 100 for my 32gb kit that is running at 2000 now

this is with older vraps(sata2 not 3) http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_velociraptors_raid_ssd_alternative
and without ram caching.

note: price wise, i would get 2 of the vraps i linked over a singel 2tb, then buy a 2tb for storage later, it would give better perf in raid0 and be close to a decent 2 tb drive(with 2-3 years warr on vs the 1 year the cheap ones have…)