Guild Wars 2

[First off I’m sorry if this is in the wrong forum area.]

This has been bugging me for the longest time but I’m not sure what kind of processor is best for gaming in general. I originally thought that Cores were all that mattered but apparently Ghz work hand in hand with Cores. I just need to know which is better for High-End Gaming specifically. I am not very knowledgeable with Processors and what they do except they handle processes and actions in the computer.

Any help or suggestion of a Great Processor for GW2 (Or just High-End Gaming/Streaming) would help, thanks!

The general consensus is that an i5 4670k/3570k or i7 4770k/3770k are great. You can also get an FX 8350 from AMD. I don’t know about the new Richland APUs from AMD but they should be ok.
The big thing about GW2 is that it is unoptimized and is a CPU pig. My 3770k is overclocked and I still get performance hits in zergs and other situations.
Those extra threads from the i7 and Fx CPUs will also help with streaming
Hope that helps you out a bit.

So from the post above, even with a cpu of 300€ you can’t run the game, better go for the amd fx 8530. It is half the price, and will do as good ingame. (and they come with default 4.0 Ghz) With the extra money you save, you can buy a better gpu or more ram.

You’ll get better gaming performance with a quad core @ 4.2GHz over an 8 core @ 3.5. If the quad core is an i7 then you get hyper-threading which will give you a performance boost for multi-threaded tasks as it provides 4 extra virtual cores, giving 8 logical cores (in it’s simplest form, 4 physical cores that can run 2 threads at once).
An 8 core AMD FX will perform really well with programs that make full use of those 8 physical cores, but games, unfortunately, don’t make use of 4 let alone 8.

Having said all that, for gaming the i5 3570k and 4670k (don’t have hyper-threading) are top notch, cheaper and will give you no problems at all. They also overclocks really well.

In answer to the above, if you’re building for GW2 alone, then spending the extra money on a high-end CPU is pointless. However, if you play any other games, it’s not as pointless although an i7 for gaming isn’t worth the extra money.

Well for Gw2 I’d go with intel anyday saying this as former user of 8core FX user. Doesnt matter how much improvements 8350brings over bulldozer, they are basically the same architecture with same bottlenecks.

Hopefully, eventually, the 8-core solution would be better for gaming. However, as it stands, games don’t really use all the cores well and some (especially Guild Wars 2) love raw frequency and single-thread performance. Right now Intel’s processors hold the single-thread performance badge while AMD’s processors generally have higher stock frequencies. I should note though that 1Ghz from Intel != 1Ghz from AMD. Their CPU architectures are vastly different and right now the latest generation is more akin to (numbers be made up, don’t shoot me) Intel 800Mhz == AMD 1Ghz Now if you’re streaming your game, the extra cores will for sure help.

In the advent of the latest generation console systems, hopefully a push will be made to use extra cores when they are present since both the xbone and ps4 will have 8-core systems.

Since you didn’t go into detail about which processors you listed in your OP, I’m going to assume they are either both from AMD or both from Intel, not mixed. If you want to stream your gaming sessions, the 8 core will serve you better even at the lower frequency since you’ll be running two ‘larger’ tasks. However, if you don’t care to stream and just want to play the game, you’ll see the quad core processor excel.

If u can afford it. get a Intel i7 3770k or 4770k.

I5’s can do well but GW2 has some areas that will max out a 4core4thread cpu.

AMD is also ok but even their best (FX 8350) lags behind a Intel CPU in GW2.

The only games off the top of my head that use 8 cores effectively is Crysis 3 and Battlefield 3. GW2 uses 3 to 4… I am getting sick of the crappy performance of this game, especially after 9 months!

When you are talking about AMD FX processors you have to remember that the cores are paired up in “modules” and running 4 threads in two modules is slower than 4 threads in four modules, by 20% even in the latest version of those processors. With three primary threads in GW2 chewing up 70% of total CPU usage within the game, I would go with the 4 module/8 core CPU over the faster 2 module/4 core model.

As for the 20% slowdown numbers. Here.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short/2

while I truly appreciate being surrounded by all computer science majors with master’s degrees that advise the best way to fix gw2 is to get a $10,000.00 computer – I admit to looking at benchmarks and facts.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Ricky.4706:

while I truly appreciate being surrounded by all computer science majors with master’s degrees that advise the best way to fix gw2 is to get a $10,000.00 computer – I admit to looking at benchmarks and facts.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

And what does that have to do with the price of tea in China or importantly gaming. The OP asked for opinions on either the FX-4350 or FX-8320, neither are expensive CPUs ($130 and $160). We aren’t talking about the over the top socket 2011 CPUs that range from $570 to over $1000.

If you want to compare inexpensive CPUs as related to gaming, check out this article and chart

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-9.html

or something more comprehensive like this article.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6934/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-single-multigpu-at-1440p

Ricky.4706:

while I truly appreciate being surrounded by all computer science majors with master’s degrees that advise the best way to fix gw2 is to get a $10,000.00 computer – I admit to looking at benchmarks and facts.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

What the educated know and are trying to tell you (apparently in vain) is that GW2 is a whole different beast than a typical processing scenario. What you want here is best possible single core performance.

Online games rarely benefit from multi-core architectures much because they are not designed to.. properly multithreaded games would be prohibitively expensive.

I jumped ship from AMD late last year. Went from a monstrously overclocked AMD to an i5 3570K.

The difference is night and day.

For GW2 you want an i5 3570k or 4670k OCed as far as they go.
i7s are mostly a waste of money for just gaming and AMDs are too power hungry and offer less performance per core. Once the next gen of consoles gets going more cores will be better for most games hopefully bringing AMD back to the race but till then intel is king.

Thanks for the help everyone. These replies enlightened me greatly.