Guild Wars 2

So the main factor for building myself a better pc was to be able to play this game in pvp with a better fps than 8-12 and hopefully be able to play WvWvW. Heres the spec’s:

CPU – i7 3770k
CPU cooler – Hyper 212 EVO
MB – ASRock z77 extreme 4
RAM – Corsair vengeance DDR3 1600 8gb (2 × 4gb)
HD – Seagate 1TB 7,200 rpm 6gb sata
GC – MSI N660 Ti PE 2GD5/OC GeForce GTX 660 Ti 2GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support
PSU – Corsair GS800
cd/dvd – under $20 drive
OS – Windows 8 pro
Case – Antec P280 Black Super Mid Tower

I just got most of the parts tonight, and want to atleast try to get the hard drive formated and OS installed so I can install all my other crap tomorrow. waiting on my graphics card, but should be here in a few days.

My main question, is will I be able to atleast play PvP with no lag? on my old PC (feels kitten good to say that!!) I would literally get 8-12 fps consistantly in pvp. WvWvW would be ideal to play in, I’m an old school DAOC player and I love big battles. Hope to see you guys out there soon!!!

no SSD? and optical drive only for one-time use? i’d rather invest it into 16GB USB drive.
stick with x64 win7, your mouse and hand will thank you.
so you are going to overclock with that i7, but how far can you go with air-cool?
you’d better off with E3-1230v2 and upgrade to GTX 670.

save your dough to better use.

No SSD yet, will get one next weekend. I wasn’t sure if I would need to OC the i7 for GW2 at all? From what I’ve read with the hyper 212 was that people are getting very good cooling from it, and less issue of a failure. The thing holding me back from a water cooler at this point in time is a few things. I have never oc’ed anything, so it’s still a little intimidating if I screw something up and burn up components. Higher chance for a failure with a water cooler, if my heatsink fan goes out it still dissipates heat. I might burn a cd or two with the optical drive but it won’t get a lot of use other than that.

Why would the E3 be better? isn’t that a slower cpu than the i7?

all the gtx 670 cards i’ve seen were 400+ and I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of cash. I got the i7 for $229.00 on sale today, otherwise I was planning on a i5 3570k. before sales tax I bought all the components for under $1000. with sales tax everything was $1,034.xx. I wanted to stay under 1 grand for this build. I do appreciate your opinions tekwiz, thanks.

Ah forgot to mention, I went with windows 8 because it was $58.99 vs paying $100+ for windows 7. Is windows 8 really that bad? tbh i havent even read reviews or looked into it, just bought it on a whim cause it was a cheap OS.

Definitely get a 64-bit OS. You probably are, but just in case, you will need it if you want to access all of that RAM you’re buying.

As for the individual components, none of them look bad. The real issue is “who is building the machine and how comfortable/competent are they?” It would be great if you could just slap all the components together and get a system that runs at its full potential, but that rarely happens. Most of the time, things will work in most cases. Sometimes, things will need to be tweaked (on a low level, in BIOS or some of the Windows system settings that most people never get to) in order to get all the hardware to play together nicely. Several people have reported needing to manually set their RAM speed because the auto-detect speeds aren’t right. So you’ll want to keep that in mind.

Also, be prepared to deal with some not-so-common issues. Especially with high performance gaming. GW2 is going to push your CPU and GPU hard. Heat will be an issue, so try to arrange the components in the case so that there is plenty of airflow and that all the heat generators are spread out. For instance, don’t put the graphics card really close to the exaust of the power supply or too close to the CPU or you add extra heat to the card, which it isn’t designed to compensate for.

Oh, and don’t overclock anything right away. Run everything at the default speeds for a few days to make sure it’s all stable. This will give you a good baseline for what’s “normal” on your PC. It also removes a significant amount of possible problems, if things aren’t stable right off the bat.

Mathisk,

I’ll be putting it together, and feel very comfortable doing so. The copy of windows 8 i got came with a 32 and 64 bit install disk. If my components need to be adjusted at the BIOS level, do you think most information on how to make those changes would be online?

i choose E3 cuz it was cheaper than i7 at time for $250. i’m not an overclock-holic and it performs on-par with i7 yet offer the price of i5 back then.

i stick with x64 of win7, reason that is lots of slim/optimization build is done and can be found on the net (provided that you have a legit copy then can do whatever to suit YOUR needs and not for re-sell purpose). which cuts down hidden bottlenecks and boggy service or bogus app. but not prone to have one be installed due to different user-habits.

burning a CD is good for building portfolio assets but i’d rather tuck it in a USB disc just because it lives longer against any physical damage. and USB disc has much bigger storage compare to a CD.

tekwiz.8635:

no SSD? and optical drive only for one-time use? i’d rather invest it into 16GB USB drive.
stick with x64 win7, your mouse and hand will thank you.
so you are going to overclock with that i7, but how far can you go with air-cool?
you’d better off with E3-1230v2 and upgrade to GTX 670.

save your dough to better use.

Bad advice. Don’t recommend E3-1230v2 just because you have it.
3770k is far better for gaming than E3-1230v2.
3770k has unlocked multiplier for easy overclocking. The E3 doesn’t.
3770k has higher base frequency and turbo.
E3 is only good for someone who doesn’t plan on overclocking and needs hyperthreading, at the cost of slower frequency and no integrated GPU.
Of course integrated GPU is useless for a gaming build but it’s a nice back up when the discreet GPU fails.

Psu is overkill, get a 450-500 watts quality psu, unless ur going SLI sometimes.

i can touch my aftermarket copper fin when E3 is running under WvW, can yours do that, no?

I say if you plan on solely gaming go for a cheaper i5-2500k or i5-3570k. Gw2 won’t make use of hyper-threading and you can overclock those processors pretty high 4.4-4.6ghz on the hyper212+/evo, in WvWvW you’re gonna need it.

I7 and E3 are more workhorses. They will work fine for gaming, but the extra features they pack does little for gaming. Save the money, go for a i5 and get a SSD instead. Going from regular spinning HD to SSD is a world of a difference.

Excelent balanced build, btw krito he got tht i7 instead the i5 cuz he found a 220$ deal for it… read the post before posting a reply… for that price i7 is a very good deal, more cache, slightly faster IPC (instructions per cycle due L3 cache) and also hyper threading (which is useless for gaming, in 2012 but may be not in 2014/2014), the 212Evo is awesome it performs as good as a corsair H80 and with 2 turbine CM fans it performs as good as a H100, so it is a very good deal, the card well i would have bought AMD card, they perform better in crossfire, and they perform better overall for the same money+i think the graphical quality is better(but that is a personal opinion, i have). And for the guy recomending the E3… Just don’t listen to him, he probably don’t know what a gaming CPU is. Have fun with ur build, it is insane for less than 1000$ i hope u enjoy it dude, u will PVPing as good as possible in GW2, even 5000$ systems won’t perform noticeably better than yours. Windows 8 performs way better than win7, better memory mamagment, it boots extremlly fast and apps are fluid as hell on it, im very glad with mine tbh, it is good to see some decent microsoft sofware finally.

P.D: 800w PSU is not an overkill…. u don’t want ur PSU running anywhere close to 80% load 24/7 if u want it to last more than 1 year.

I had to LOL at alot of the post on here. Dragon their nothing wrong with that build it looks solid, a SSD is not a big deal reall, (just perrty much quicker load times) that CPU cooler will do just fine you can probably get a good overclock if you wish 4.2 or so easy, the PSU is overkill but no big deal you will draw about 350 WATTS with that PC under a full stress test so a 600 Watt would of been pleanty, Windows 8 myself I would of passed on this was not for nothing. http://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2012/11/16/consumers_still_hesitant_to_upgrade_to_windows_8
For anuther coment made no the CPU cooler will not perform as good as my H100! It was stated it would with a fan upgrade but I run 4x 110CFM fans on mine in push/pull.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

As someone else posted I got the i7 for 229.00 so it was cheaper than what I’ve seen the i5 3570k’s going for (319.00 I think) so that’s why I got the i7. I installed windows 8 last night… and well… im installing windows 7 right now. I didn’t like 8 at all, maybe will move to it later on down the road. I did a little digging last night and from the bench mark tests done windows 8 is slightly faster than 7 in most aspects but not by much. Thanks again for the replies, can’t wait for my freaking graphics card to get here now!!!

You didn’t install the OS on the SSD?

Dragon.7261:

Thanks for the replies everyone.

As someone else posted I got the i7 for 229.00 so it was cheaper than what I’ve seen the i5 3570k’s going for (319.00 I think) so that’s why I got the i7. I installed windows 8 last night… and well… im installing windows 7 right now. I didn’t like 8 at all, maybe will move to it later on down the road. I did a little digging last night and from the bench mark tests done windows 8 is slightly faster than 7 in most aspects but not by much. Thanks again for the replies, can’t wait for my freaking graphics card to get here now!!!

While you wait on your GPU download prime95 and realtemp. Run prime 95 as admin do a custom blend 100% of the cpu (use all the cores) and 80% of the ram and monitor your temps with realtemp. Keep a good eye on your temps for the first 15/20 mins then check it from time to time I would let this run 8 hours min.

Ill have to look into prime95 more but thanks for that tip Zerk.

This pc hauls so much better than my old system. even without my graphics card i can play in pvp and wvwvw with better graphics than before and stay at a constant 30 fps at almost all times.

Didn’t have much issues setting everything up. It’s crazy how having a computer that can run this game makes it completely different than how it seemed to me before. I F’n love this game now.

Dragon.7261:

Ill have to look into prime95 more but thanks for that tip Zerk.

This pc hauls so much better than my old system. even without my graphics card i can play in pvp and wvwvw with better graphics than before and stay at a constant 30 fps at almost all times.

Didn’t have much issues setting everything up. It’s crazy how having a computer that can run this game makes it completely different than how it seemed to me before. I F’n love this game now.

When you build a new PC always stress test the parts. Also I hope you did not put the disc in for the motherboard and click install all if you did you just got alot of extra trash on your PC.

if you’re talking about the 220 deal for 3770k, there was also the 100 deal for the 2500k. 3570k for 150 is also in the works for BF