Guild Wars 2

My friend has asked me to post this on the forums for him, thanks for any help i’l pass on any messages received.

Hello my friend is hoping to play guild wars soon but he needs to purchase a new machine first! He’s found 2 so far that seem like they’d run GW fine, hopefully on medium settings. But which one? And why

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Dual-Xeon-6-4Ghz-Desktop-Gaming-PC-Windows-7-Pro-Tower-4GB-NEW-1GB-HDMI-GFX-/140920905674?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item20cf8a5fca
OR
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dual-Core-3Ghz-AMD-ATHLON-II-X2-250-2GB-80GB-6570-Desktop-PC-Gaming-Computer-/190745865570?pt=UK_Computing_DesktopPCs&hash=item2c6956ed62
(i will probably add another stick of ram, or two for this one)

His budget is 250 tops!

Neither are great or even good.

The first one doesn’t have a decent video card (well neither do but the HD 6570 is a lot better than a HD 5450).

But the second one doesn’t have an OS, only 2GB of memory and a tiny hard drive.

GW2 is not a game you can play (at anything resembling reasonable settings) on a machine with a 250 dollar/quid/whatever budget.

Sorry.

Nether,

They are not gaming machines, they are basic work stations. They wont play GW2 very well if atall.

Sugest u advise ur freind on the proper costs of being a PC gamer. It aint cheap..but its well worth it over consoles.

Just tell him that $250 is the average cost of a good GPU, or a Intel CPU..and that there are 8 other basic componentes within a PC case (inc the case)..then u have the monitor, keyboard ando ther perifiarels ontop. A Proper budget would be $1000, for eveything, or $800 for just the PC itself.

These won’t work. I don’t know where you live but, there is a guy on Ebay who has decently priced machines, that will work with GW2.

http://stores.ebay.com/riodeels

None as cheap as $250 but a number of them far under the $800 others have mentioned.

The problem is that people come here saying “I want to max GW2 in WvW on a $xxx budget”

That isn’t happening with the way the game is coded right now. Even guys with top tier machines don’t maintain framerates we’d like to.

If you just want to world clear solo, or do dungeons, or play scenario pvp, then sure, a sub $800 box will work just fine on lower settings.

If you want to play with all the eye candy, and do the endgame of WvW, you need a high dollar box to make it happen.

I’m sorry that’s the case, but this is PC gaming, and the best of the best costs serious money.

Behellagh.1468:

Neither are great or even good.

The first one doesn’t have a decent video card (well neither do but the HD 6570 is a lot better than a HD 5450).

But the second one doesn’t have an OS, only 2GB of memory and a tiny hard drive.

it probably doesnt have an OS on it because the HDD isnt big enough lmfao

“I probably should have stated in the first message that we live in the UK, don’t know how all of you managed to miss the .co.uk ebay link and the fact the price was in pounds, but either way both our mistake. I don’t know where you’re getting these mad numbers from, 800$ which roughly £550 give or take is more than enough for a barebone PC. I run GW2 on a Acer Aspire 5560G which can run it fine on medium settings and that roughly set me back £350 which is a laptop, generally more expsensive than desk tops.”

chowie.4278:

“I probably should have stated in the first message that we live in the UK, don’t know how all of you managed to miss the .co.uk ebay link and the fact the price was in pounds, but either way both our mistake. I don’t know where you’re getting these mad numbers from, 800$ which roughly £550 give or take is more than enough for a barebone PC. I run GW2 on a Acer Aspire 5560G which can run it fine on medium settings and that roughly set me back £350 which is a laptop, generally more expsensive than desk tops.”

I noticed the .uk

It doesn’t change the facts. The first one doesn’t have a even moderately decent video card while the second one does (relatively speaking) but is memory poor and has no OS. Both have serious problems.

I’m not familiar with UK based parts suppliers or boutique PC vendors to point you to a better rig.

Lets break it down a bit further.

The 1st rig is sporting two single core Pentium 4 based Xeon CPUs and 4GB DDR2 memory while the 2nd is sporting an Athlon II dual core at 3.0GHz and 2GB DDR3 memory. 2nd system wins on the CPU front but only 2GB of memory will be a problem when running this game.

1st rig is running an HD 5450 graphics card while the 2nd is running an HD 6570. No contest the 2nd system wins.

1st rig has a 500GB HD with a copy of Win 7 64-bits while the 2nd has a 80GB hard drive and no OS. So out of the box the 1st rig is bootable at least.

So the 2nd system is better, CPU and GPU wise but only if you get it a realistically sized hard drive, another 2GB of memory (you will need to replace the two 1GB sticks with two 2GB sticks, the motherboard appears to have only two memory slots) and a copy of Win 7 64-bit.

Chowie. Im from the UK .. i usualy state things in $‘s becouse most people who ask on here have been from the US, so i was ’asuming’ there, my apologies.

However, u cant go by exchange rates (at this time $1 = £0.66). Let me explain.

If u look up a part cost in the US, then convert to GBP, then add on 20% VAT + a little extra for other duties and vendor profit, u end up with a figure above that of a straight up exchange rate swap, in some casses its lower than a direct 1:1, other times it is almost exactly 1:1. So… when i said $800 to $1000, u might aswell asume £700to £900.

An example.
US : http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RjRq
UK : http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/RjRq

Going by exchange rates that would be £564 ..but its actually £714

Those links also happen to be a build that i would sugest as a suitable GW2 running machine, its a little low on the GPU side, it would likely be good ot run GW2 on a mixture of medium and high settings for constant 60fps in PvE, and it would likely only OC the CPU to about 4.2 or 4.3ghz with that cooler which is under what i would recommend for best WvW performance (4.5ghz atleast), so WvW battles would likely be in the region of 15(worst case) to 25 FPS.