Guild Wars 2

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.

As SolarNova said, GW2 does not make full use of the CPU by any stretch of the imagination. The usage actually drops when you enter WvW when it should do the opposite assuming the graphics card is up to the job.
As far as optimisation goes, GW2 is in very early stages. In the future will we definitely see improvements, but akittens current stage, nothing at the moment will get anywhere close to 60fps in large zergs, so if you’re building for GW2 alone, wait a bit.

I just want to point out that threads and cores are different things and 3 threads on a CPU is nothing, your word processor uses more than that.

For gaming alone, more cores won’t increase performance and often for recording a bottleneck is the hard drive (assuming the rest of the build is solid), so get a quality SSD for recording onto.

CPU wise, Intel have the upper hand for gaming at the moment. The i5 3570k (Ivy Bridge) and 4670k (Haswell) are two of the best gaming CPUs around, you’ll have no problem with those for a while plus they, at least the 3570k, overclocks superbly. Having said that, an i7, due to the hyper-threading, will speed up video encoding and help with heavy video editing.
The guys above me have given some good advice for RAM, and as Basketcase said, if your going to be doing serious video editing, go for something higher than just 8GB.

Passmark is a great site for looking at hardware benchmarks and I highly recommend looking at it before you buy http://www.cpubenchmark.net/.

The others have mentioned the 650 and 660, note that there is a big performance gap between the 650 and 660, so go for the 660 if you have to choose between them. It was the same with the 450 & 460 and the 550 & 560, and go for the Ti version.

Different games will perform differently on the same hardware. Games are similar to different hardware in the fact that they all have different architecture which affects performance & visuals in different ways. Remember that BF is an online FPS and GW2 is an MMORPG. There’s a huge amount of engine differences there and it’s a longer process optimising an MMO. GW2 is quite a bit newer than Battlefield as well so when optimsations are introduced down the line, you will see a performance increase.

That’s the raw technical stuff which doesn’t show real word values from other factors like board/chip architecture and clock speeds. Also, you’ll notice the Texel rate for the 560 is significantly higher. Check out http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ for actual scores for hardware (click the Video Card tab)

Upgrade the video card, yeah. As I said previously, don’t go by minimum requirements; they just say what you need for the game to run. A decent upgrade from your current card would be something along the line of a NVidia GTX 560Ti/AMD 6970 or even better jump up to a 660, depending on your budget of course

If that’s 40fps on the high settings then no, that sounds about right. The minimum requirements are there as a guideline to show what hardware you need at a minimum to actually run the game, not play the game at 60fps on high settings.
If you want better performance, you could upgrade your graphics card or just lower the settings.

This is quite normal, nothing to worry about. Super-sampling increases the load on the GPU by a significant amount and so, because your GPU is working harder, the temperatures will increase. Thus, to keep it cool, the fan speeds up. 77 degrees is actually fine for a GPU under load and 65 is a perfectly fine temperature. You can, if you really want, lower the fan speed with a tool like MSI Afterburner, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it’s obviously keeping itself cool on the current settings. Just make sure it doesn’t increase too much more.
If the noise is bothering you, check your case’s airflow and remove any dust build up inside the case including around the fans.

I’ll just add a few things to what’s already been said.
If you want to run games on max settings at that resolution at 60fps (I’m assuming you don’t have a 120Hz monitor), SLI is most probably the way to go just because you get more performance for your money. However, remember that some games do not play nice with SLI and people have had problems with it and GW2, it may be fixed now though. 4GB VRAM should easily be enough.
In regards to the CPU, you want something that can feed the GPUs with some overhead (i.e. not bottleneck the GPUs and also not be running flat out while gaming). i7s are great for multi-threaded and multi-core processes due to the hyper-threading and slightly larger cache compared to the i5s. Unfortunately games do not take advantage of these differences. Will you really notice the difference gaming? Only if the i5 bottlenecks the cards which is unlikely on a 3570k as long as you don’t get something stupid like 2 Titans. i7s usually come clocked slightly higher, but if you don’t mind overclocking, an i5 3570k, for example, is awesome at ~4.5GHz.

Excellent, glad I could help and that you got it sorted! You’re temperatures were fine, yeah, but removing the dust every so often is always a good idea

The CPU is fine as long as the GPU is running as much as it can be, which it is. From those numbers it’s very odd to get such low FPS. When was the last time you updated your graphics drivers?
If an update does nothing, you might try re-seating the graphics card; it may have some dust in it or just not be sitting right. Also have look at memory usage while the game is running, both video and system memory.

Those temps are fine if they stay at that.
How much are your CPU and GPU being used while playing? Play for 5-10 minutes and take an average usage percentage of the CPU and do the same for the GPU. Report back with those numbers and we can go from there.