Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I have just aquired the game ( and i`m so excited about it hurray ) but unfortunately i can’t play it yet because the pc i have is very outdated. I am going to build a new very low buget pc exclusively for this game. After many searches i saw that AMD it`s out of question (AMD fans pls don’t go nuts) as far as GW2 is concerned so i`ll have to go with INTEL,processor-wise.

-Would there be any sesizable difference between i3-4170 and Anniversary G3258 (OC-ed lets say to 4GHZ with stock-cooler) in therms of FPS in any area of the game (Pvp,WvW,PvE etc) ?
-Will i be able to play decently(30+,or 20+ WvW) the game with G3258 OC-ed to 4GHZ (since it`s way cheaper)? Curently here G3258 is 83 USD and the i3 4170 is 140 dolars. (PS :i5 is outa discussion,way to expensive)

Edit # Mobo : GIGABYTE GA-H81M-S1
GPU : Sapphire Radeon R7 240 WITH BOOST 1GB DDR5 128-bit
SSD : Kingston HyperX FURY 120GB SATA-III 2.5 inch
RAM :HyperX Savage 4GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 (adding 4GB more in future)
PSU : nJoy 450WGX 450W

I would go with the G3258 and OC it. i3s are limited in OCing and HT is a extremely poor substitute for 2 additional “cores”.

[tech stuff]
HT is simply smoke and mirrors to con the OS into assigning addition and hopefully unrelated “threads” of code to each core to improve each core’s efficiency. In the end it’s has the same average results as modest (20%) overclocking except HT improvement is variable and sometimes has a negative impact in a cores’s overall performance.
[/tech stuff]

So yes, G3258 and a nice $30 3rd party heat sink and OC it.

As for will you be able to play decently in WvW, the game really does better when it has 4 real cores but a true Intel quad core isn’t cheap.

The g3258 overclocked will be better, since gw2 loves higher single core performance, specially in heavy situations with lots of people.

But if you want to overclock the g3258 you’ll need a better motherboard. The one you listed is very low-end MB and it can even be unable to overclock.
If you want to go for the g3258 and overclock it, you should be looking for some b85 or h97 capable to overclock, or go safe with a z97.

i might be able to squeze my budget a lil bit if B85 is really needed for OC ( everywhere says u can do it even on h81 but meh)

What about the RT 240 boosted DDR5 1 gb ? Will it sustain the game ? this mobo is the cheapest ddr5 i could find.

Some H81s can OC a G3258 Ansau, that isn’t a problem. From my understanding as long as you have the most current BIOS then you will be able to with a Gigabyte H81 microATX motherboard. But here’s a list of tested motherboards.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2389948

And a few articles on it OCing the G3258 on an H81

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pentium-g3258-b81-cheap-overclocking,3888.html
http://www.techpowerup.com/202196/asus-enables-overclocking-on-h97-h87-b85-and-h81-series-motherboards.html
http://www.ukgamingcomputers.co.uk/overclocking-pentium-g3258-on-h81-b75-h87-h97-chipsets-a-60.html

Of course the gpu will be suficient, but don’t expect to run the game higher than medium to have a good framerate.

The problems with overclocking on H81 is you might be locked by BIOS, and the H81 is so low budget it might not be able to stand an enough overclock as you would desire.
Get a B85 or H97, as you will have much better quality to overclock and also more useful features, like pcie3.0 instead of 2.0 from H81.

PD: I would like to see all those g3258 at such overclocks playing gw2 for hours in H81 MB. My experience tells me gw2 is one of a hell cpu stress test, even more reliable than any synthetic stress test. A cpu can crash with just a few minutes while playing gw2, even after passing 2h of both IETU and AIDA64.
All their OC validations are worthless, only 10s of superpi, less than 2 minutes of stress in firestrike, 15min of OCCT… too small times done in synthetic tests. Give me a 2 hours of gameplay in BF4 multiplayer, GTA V or gw2 zerguing and I will validate h81 are able to keep those OC.

Playing it on medium with 30+FPS overall and playable WvW is my goal I think i saw some guy on youtube with 4.5 GHZ OC on aH81 mobo inWvW ( well i`ll be happy with even 4ghz on a cheap mobo with stockcooler )

Behellagh.1468:

[tech stuff]
HT is simply smoke and mirrors to con the OS into assigning addition and hopefully unrelated “threads” of code to each core to improve each core’s efficiency. In the end it’s has the same average results as modest (20%) overclocking except HT improvement is variable and sometimes has a negative impact in a cores’s overall performance.
[/tech stuff]

You should have gone a bit more into detail on that. Depending on the application hyperthreading can show improvement of way over 30% – up to a 100% actually. When cpu instructions of a thread are executed, there’s usually not the whole core used and parts of it stay inactive. The second thread that the core executes simultaneously might (in the best case scenario) use the remaining parts. But yes, HT improvement is highly variable, that it hurts performance is rarely the case, though.

A pentium g3258 would need to be clocked at just over 4.8ghz to roughly equal the performance of an i3 4170 on average.

Yes can show up to 100%, but rarely, nearly as rarely as the times performance is worse. It’s very dependent on the kind of app and games in general aren’t one of the ones that make a big difference in. And unlike the similarly clocked i3-4360, the 4170 only has 3 MB of L3, not 4 MB which decreases the likely gain from HT.

Where you are right is the notion that a 4 GHz OC of a G3258 was enough to compete with the i3-4170’s default clock speed, it isn’t. If the OP doesn’t want to commit to OC the G3258 to it’s max with a good 3rd party cooler, and the price difference between the i3-4170 and the G3258 isn’t better spent on food/rent, then the i3 is probably the better choice.

His PSU choice implies the OP is in Eastern Europe so the price difference may be more than the 80% difference, $60, found here. So it may be a budget issue.

The ancient Tom’s Hardware hardware review of GW2 had the i3 giving only a mere 3% over a duel-core Pentium at the same clockspeed so a 4.0 GHz G3258 Vs a 3.7 GHz i3-4170 may be too close to call.

Thanks for pointing out the default clock speed difference, I wrongly assumed it was closer.

The thing that you must pay attention to is the VRM design. 4 phases is not going to yield a high overclock, compared to 6 and 8 phases. Also high quality VRM is better then more low quality. So knowing what VRMs are used is also important.

I have personally tested this on h81(ECS board of all things) H97M (MSI) and Z87 and Z97. The h81 had 4 VRMs, while the H97M had 6, and my Z87/97’s both have 8.

My H81 could not get the G3258 above 4.2ghz, while the h97m was able to get 4.5. The Z87/97 could OC the chip to 4.8. Its all in the VRM design.

A g3258 clocked at 4.6ghz(ideal) beats every i3 out there. It also beats every AMD CPU out there as well (Single threaded performance), and comes in at about 55% behind the FX8350 in multithreaded performance.

I`ll go with G3258 , thanks . You can close the thread