Guild Wars 2

Saalem.7194:

thalenduros has some good points. though i wouldnt go out of the way for an intel. intels do benchmark better than amd, but that doesnt really mean intel is a must buy. the AMD cpu’s are great and fdefinately worth the price. i can safely say my amd cpu runs gw2 amazingly. didnt want you to think you absolutely have to buy an intel… good luck on your build, (you should do it yourself lol!)

It isn’t just benchmarks… GW2 plays measurably better on Intel than AMD machines.

If you already have an AMD system, you can certainly play GW2. It’s just the i5 does it significantly better when everything else is the same. The OP is buying new. Why not go for the best his budget allows?

If you are on a much lower budget than this poster, you might be able to make a case for a cheap and overclocked 4170 or 4300 series Piledriver and using the price difference to up your GPU. You’d be relying on a hefty overclock to counteract the differences between the two in games, but it might work out for you with a little luck.

At $1000, I’d just get the i5 and be confident in knowing that AMD doesn’t have a processor that will beat it at stock. (not even the Piledriver 8-cores)

Try to build on an Intel system. For this game in particular AMD just doesn’t work out for price/performance.

Z77 motherboard and 3GHz+ i5 should be first.

Never mind with liquid cooling at this price range. Air cooling is fine. A good air cooler (anything better than the stock intel one) is a good idea. Liquid cooling is for people who have existing god-boxes or have maxed everything else and are looking to stretch their $1000 CPUs. Whatever money you would have spent on a liquid cooler, put it into better GPU ro CPU. (in that order)

Even liquid-cooled and heavily overclocked, a stock Ivy-bridge i5 will destroy an FX-6100 in this game.

600W is more than enough for this build unless you plan on x-fire/SLI.
Saving yourself some money on the little things might allow you to bump up CPU or GPU up a notch.

The 7870 is an amazing price/performance GPU, but better is better. Right now, the 7950 really isn’t that much more money on the market. (not necessarily ibuypower)
On newegg.com the sapphire 7950 is actually only $10 more expensive than the 7870 after rebate.

Don’t forget that if you order a system, call them and negotiate. Example, since anyone can buy a 7950 for slightly more than a 7870, see if they will lower their difference to be similar.

Your step dad can likely order you the parts for a much better machine for $1000.
He might be able to help you focus your money into CPU/GPU and make a MUCH better machine.

While I prefer self-builds…
Don’t forget that having a guarantee and pretested system is indeed worth something.
Builders get lower prices and better systems, but we also deal with RMAs, bad hardware, builder/roommate/significant other goofs, and a number of other challenges. :-)

First off, the stats of the Alienware you list are very low for your budget.

If you have a knowledgeable friend who can help you build it (even for a small fee), you could build a fairly powerful rig for $1000. We are talking 8GB ivy bridge i5 and GTX660ti or AMD 7950 or higher and a small SSD + 500GB hard disk.

If you don’t have an option like this, or you just don’t want to risk it, I am fairly certain you can find a custom PC builder who can do better than a low end i5 and 550ti.

I went to ibuypower.com (not recommending them, just the first one google came up with) and configured a 3570K with an AMD 7870 system with all the trimmings for your budget.

Anything AMD 7770, 6970 and above or 460, 560, or 650ti and above will beat the 550ti hands down. (it is not a bad card, but your budget should be able to afford better)
I’d shoot for 560Ti, 660, 6950, 7850 and above.

You do NOT need an i7. GW2 does not gain any measurable benefit from hyperthreading or cores above 4. It does use the higher clocks of the i7, but usually the difference in clock between an i5 and i7 is not worth the price bump.

The difference between a $1000+ six-core Sandy-bridge-E running at 4GHz and a $220 i5 2500K at 3GHz is 4-7%. (with one of the best GPUs on the market)

The difference between a i3 with hyperthreading and a Pentium running at the same clock rate without HT are margin-for-error level.

GW2 DOES use four cores. The i5s perform 30%+ better than dual core i3s or pentiums.

You do want a good processor, but an i5 is good enough. Try to get the most raw clock speed in an i5 as you can. This isn’t to say an i7 isn’t good too, its to say you are much better off spending the difference in price between an i5 and i7 on GPU if you can.

For whatever reason, GW2 has noticeably lower performance on AMD CPUs. For the purpose of GW2, you can safely ignore AMD CPUs for a new purchase as they are not efficient price/performance for this game. (A $74 Sandy Bridge pentium gets better frame rates than an 8-core $190 AMD processor.)

First off, Intel processors and AMD GPUs work just fine together.
So do AMD processors and Nvidia GPUs.
I’ve built them all four ways and frankly it really doesn’t matter unless you have a motherboard compatibility issue. Buy the fastest CPU and GPU you can afford or the ones you can get the best deal for. Do not worry about matching brands.

The only catch is that some motherboards do not support X-fire or SLI. The motherboard you are looking at officially supports both.

Resist the temptation to massively overpower your computer.
The 800W power supply you have listed is plenty for dual GPU systems of this generation.
As long as you aren’t planning fairly massive RAID arrays of physical disks, 800W will power even an overclocked Ivy bridge processor and dual GPU system, with a decent amount of hard disks and room to spare. Spend your money on QUALITY of power supply. I prefer Seasonic, Antec, and rebrands of either of those two. (Corsair is most often a Seasonic rebrand.)

Some notes and warnings on your intended build.

-If you are going to spend $300 on a K-series unlocked CPU, please do yourself a favor and buy a CPU cooler better than the stock one Intel ships. The Intel stock cooling is embarrassingly bad for i5 and above. If you ever plan on overclocking, or would like to actually use your CPU to its full potential even at stock clocks, at least get a $30 air cooler.
Coolermaster hyper 212 EVO is $30 with rebate and is one of the best values for all but the most serious of overclockers. It will drop your under-load temps by 20 degrees Celsius or more over the Intel stock cooling.
I completely agree on Noctua making amazing solutions… but they are 2x to 3x as expensive as the 212 EVO. I think I’d rather spend the difference between a 212 EVO and a Noctua on a step-up on the GPU.

-The Gigabyte G1 Sniper M3 is very nice, but has a couple downsides you should know about.

1) From looking at a picture, the four RAM slots are going to be fairly close to the processor. It will be difficult to get four pieces of RAM in those slots and mount a nicer CPU cooler. Note I said difficult and not impossible. It all depends on the RAM and the cooler. The Noctua is going to make this even more difficult. (unless they have a new model I haven’t seen)

2) The G1 Sniper M3 has x16 and x8 slots for x-fire or SLI, but the board is Micro ATX and thus may make dual-GPU solutions less than convenient.
The x8 slot is the bottom one and blocks the front panel connectors and USB headers if you use higher-end GPUs that have dual-slot coolers. If you do not plan on SLI/x-fire in the future, or plan on using single-slot GPUs this is a non-issue.

-I really think you should make some minor sacrifices in CPU and RAM to bump the GPU up to 7950, 660Ti or better. That 7870 you list is $260 on newegg. You can get a Sapphire 7950 for $270 with rebate on Newegg. A 660Ti would be $20 more.

You can drop $70 by just bumping down to the i5 3570K. All you lose is hyperthreading and 100MHz turbo stock, and GW2 does not seem to use more than 4 threads at once. In any case, a 7950+3570K should thrash a 7870+3770K in most games for $60 less.

As I mentioned before, 4×4GB of RAM might be impossible using that that board and a decent cooler. It also seems overkill for playing GW2. Why not bump down to 4GBx2 and not only save the hassle, but the money too. Unless you have multiple VMs open at once, or frequently run a memory-intensive program, 8GB is pretty much overkill. 16GB is double overkill for most people. You will save $30-40 in the process.

Using those two steps you save $100-$110 which might put you in the range of a 7970 or GTX670! it would be well worth your while to spend an extra $10-20 on an 8GB 3570K+7970(GTX670) over a 16GB 3770K+7870!

I play on a 8GB 4.4GHz i5 2500K and GTX560Ti (1070core/4600ram) and have absolutely no frame rate issues. I am not sure why an SLI 670 system would. All of the systems discussed here dwarf my system by a significant margin.

I purchased a copy for my brother and he has been unable to create a game account now for 6 days.

Every time he tries to fill in information for a game account, he gets “you have a guildwars 1 account and need to link it.” He does NOT have a GW1 account to his knowledge.
He has no option to just continue without linking.

He has a key and cannot create an account!

He made a support account and submitted a ticket on 9/19/2012.
[Incident: 120920-001017]

While I know you guys are swamped, this seems like an easy fix.
1) have an admin create a game account using the support account info that should be listed with the ticket.
2) attach game key to that account
3) notify user that he can log into game with support account info and any other special settings or security options he must change

I would appreciate being able to play this amazing game with my brother.

Thank you for your time.