Guild Wars 2

(Not sure if this is the right place to put this but if not im sure it can be moved)

Hey,

I was wondering about how much of a difference using an i5 intel core would be over a i7, I’m looking at getting a laptop and have a choice between those,

i5-3210M (2.50 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.1 GHz -2GB Graphics)
vs
i7-3612QM (2.10 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.10 GHz – 2GB Graphics)

Both would be with the 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M Graphics card

Also would 8GB vs 16GB of RAM, is 16GB overkill.

With these components would that be enough to play GWs2 on Ultra with 1080p?

Thanks
David

I would recommend against getting the 640M graphics chip. It will probably play the game, but not well. It’s a media card and isn’t really designed for high performance gaming. It’ll be better than the Intel HD integrated chips but…

Ideally, you’ll want an nVidia model number that ends with something over 50. So a 660 or a 670 would be good gaming cards.

As for RAM, 8GB is pretty much overkill, also. More RAM means you can have more things open at once without having to page data to the hard drive when you swap applications. If the upgrade to 16GB is cheap, it wont’ hurt anything, but you might be better off saving the money for the extra memory and applying it toward a computer with a better graphics card. imo…

I would go with the I7 but either way you wont be playing on ultra. Medium probably for playable fps.

I’m currently playing on a first gen i3 M370 2.40 GHz with 3GBs RAM GeForce GT 420M on highest/medium (just looking distance set to low and a couple of other settings at medium but most on highest) setting on 1366×768 so I was expecting better performance from the specs I put above?

I’ve read around that there is no noticable difference between the i5 and i7 cores because the hyperthreading isnt utilised by most games these days, or something like that.
Thanks for the input guys.

The only real difference between the i5 and i7 is the hyperthreading feature. The i5 doesn’t have this. Hyperthreading basically doubles the amount of cores by creating 4 virtual cores in addition to the 4 physical ones. While this is useful for heavy multitasking, it is generally useless for gaming, and will actually cause problems with some games. I have hyperthreading disabled on my i7 to improve gaming performance and decrease heat. Unless you plan on doing very heavy multitasking, go for the i5. It has the higher default clock speed as well. And as for the 640m graphics chipset, it is designed for performance mobile gaming, and will do fine.

Edit: The above was regarding the desktop CPU versions. As the below poster pointed out, the mobile versions are different. The i5-3210M is dual core and the i7-3612QM is quad core. Good to know. In that case, definitely go for the i7 if you can.

TBH the 640m should cope fine, acording to Notebookcheck gamin benchmarks it is about 15/20% faster than the gt555m in my laptop depending on the game, ok I have not tryed Guildwars 2 on my laptop yet but I do have WoW, SWTOR, Assinscreed 2, Skyrim installed on it and they all run really well.

gt640m
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-640M.71579.0.html

HunterofDusk.1059:

(Not sure if this is the right place to put this but if not im sure it can be moved)

Hey,

I was wondering about how much of a difference using an i5 intel core would be over a i7, I’m looking at getting a laptop and have a choice between those,

i5-3210M (2.50 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.1 GHz -2GB Graphics)
vs
i7-3612QM (2.10 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.10 GHz – 2GB Graphics)

Both would be with the 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M Graphics card

Also would 8GB vs 16GB of RAM, is 16GB overkill.

With these components would that be enough to play GWs2 on Ultra with 1080p?

Thanks
David

The i5-3210M is a dual-core processor with hyperthreading (2 physical cores, 4 virtual cores), the i7-3612QM is a quad-core processor with hyperthreading (4 physical cores, 8 virtual cores), so I would heavily recommend the i7.

16GB of RAM is not overkill, windows will use the free RAM to cache your most used files, so there is no such thing as “unused” RAM. Think of it as a mini-SSD.

Thanks for the replies people its been very helpful So basically the best choice would be the i7, but would it make a noticable difference? And how noticable would it be?

Thanks again!

Just a heads up even with i7 3612qm you wont have stable fps on Ultra settings specially in wvw and large events.

@Alpha Dragon, I’ve seen people run Skyrim on Ultra setting with good fps, but I see what you mean about big events/WvW, would it run fine, in normal playing, that way i can just tone down settings for those cases.

But I still would like to know how much of a difference the i5 would have to a i7, and surely the grphics settings wil mainly be leaning on the graphics card?

For Laptops the i7 really shine in CPU intensive games(ex gw2) since it’s a quad core vs dual cores.

if it’s a nearly equally clocked i5 compared to i7, then there’s little benefit for the i7 especially in gaming. hyper threading doesn’t benefit most games, in fact it can make some run slightly slower due to overhead of the virtual cores.

Aristar.4095:

if it’s a nearly equally clocked i5 compared to i7, then there’s little benefit for the i7 especially in gaming. hyper threading doesn’t benefit most games, in fact it can make some run slightly slower due to overhead of the virtual cores.

Yep true but in terms of laptops the i7 quads > i5 duals. If its i7 (i7 3770k ) vs i5 (i5 3570k) desktop in gaming there would be no diff.

It’s laptop cpu’s, what VirtualBS said is correct you will want the core i7 because it’s a quad-core.

Hey,

I would really go for the i5 and spend some more money on the graphics card, the 640M might be not enough for Ultra settings and other future games.

Again, both i5-3210M and i7-3612QM have hyperthreading. The only difference is this i5 is a dual-core CPU and the i7 is a quad-core.

I wouldn’t even blink in choosing the i7 vs the i5 for gaming. Heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, you can bet on that.

VirtualBS.3165:

Again, both i5-3210M and i7-3612QM have hyperthreading. The only difference is this i5 is a dual-core CPU and the i7 is a quad-core.

I wouldn’t even blink in choosing the i7 vs the i5 for gaming. Heavily multithreaded game engines are the future, you can bet on that.

You know i got the exact same sales pitch for multi threated games back in 2008 gues what, my dual core equipped rig still plays the recent AAA titles like a peach, no problem at all(apart from GW2 forcing a re install down my throat)

Ok, thanks guys, so the i7 is a go to for the laptop im after, and i’ll see about going for a better graphics card,
Is the 2GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M much improvement over the 640M?

Looking at the Alienware M14x for the 650M (was following the XPS15 L521x for the 640M laptop, not planning on purchasing either until there is a “final” decision on the wifi problems with the xps)
For a bit more cash I could look at the Alienware M17x with a GTX 675M (or for another £250 a GTX680M but I probably wont fork out that much unless I really feel like it ;P)

tests at toms hardware are showing that the difference between an i5 and an i7 are negligible. i5 is the optimal system for Guild Wars 2. If you have an i5 with 4 gigs of ram and a gtx560 card, you can run Guild Wars 2 on ultra. Hyperthreading does not benefit games currently, especially mmos.

Incredible, the number of people in this thread that didn’t even bother to check that mobile versions of i5 vs i7 don’t relate to their desktop counterparts!

Mistbooster.1803, ever since I got my first quad-core (Q6600 o/c@3.2GHz) I never looked back! Especially with CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 coming shortly.

HunterofDusk.1059, the GTX 675M is probably worth it, depending on your budget. http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GTX-675M.70785.0.html

HunterofDusk.1059:

(Not sure if this is the right place to put this but if not im sure it can be moved)

Hey,

I was wondering about how much of a difference using an i5 intel core would be over a i7, I’m looking at getting a laptop and have a choice between those,

i5-3210M (2.50 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.1 GHz -2GB Graphics)
vs
i7-3612QM (2.10 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.10 GHz – 2GB Graphics)

Both would be with the 2 GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 640M Graphics card

Also would 8GB vs 16GB of RAM, is 16GB overkill.

With these components would that be enough to play GWs2 on Ultra with 1080p?

Thanks
David

No laptop is able to run on Ultra without overclocking…

VirtualBS.3165:

Incredible, the number of people in this thread that didn’t even bother to check that mobile versions of i5 vs i7 don’t relate to their desktop counterparts!

Mistbooster.1803, ever since I got my first quad-core (Q6600 o/c@3.2GHz) I never looked back! Especially with CryEngine 3 and Unreal Engine 4 coming shortly.

And considering both of those are still going to use only 1 core of your PC, the multhithreading means is they benefit from multiple graphics cards cores, you know like l4d2 has done ummm 2 years now?

GW2 uses all 8 cores on my hyperthreaded i7-2600K. CPU multithreading is very different than GPU shader multithreading, since they are doing very different kinds of processing.

Ok finaly got around to installing it on my lap top and the game seems to run perfectly fine tbh only tried it in Lions Arch and the Black Citadel.

i7 2630qm
4 gig ram
W7
gt 555m 306.23 driver
1600×900 screen res
Getting between 30/50 fps with alot of the settings on high

Try to turn off reflections and depth blur, should give you a very nice boost, instead on lowering the other settings (Reflections in off will give an effect similar to reflections in WoW, tbh still pretty good).