Guild Wars 2

I have to agree with the others, this sounds very much like either an overheating issue or something specific (possibly the motherboard) malfunctioning.

jabez.6827:

my cpu is cooled with an aftermarket fan (sycthe shuriken rev.b) because the stock was too loud

Have you taken the side panel off the case and checked that all the fans are actually spinning? Also make sure, while the PC is powered off, that all the fans are clear of dust and able to turn smoothly (if they feel reluctant to turn they may too worn and not doing a very good job anymore).

The easiest way to confirm or rule out overheating is monitoring your temperatures while you play. There are lots of different options for that like Speccy, HWmonitor and many others, but if you only have 1 monitor and play in fullscreen alt-tabbing out will cause temps to drop instantly as the load is taken off the hardware, so the best tool would be one that either plots temperature changes over time in a graph or one that at least records min/max values (HWmonitor does min/max temps – I’m not sure about anything that graphs both CPU and GPU temps).

I would assume they go into the My Documents / Guild Wars 2 folder, so try checking there.

I would start with a complete clean reinstall of your graphics card driver:

step 1: install a driver cleaning utility like Driver Sweeper or Driver Fusion

step 2: go to Start -> Control Panel -> Programs and Features and uninstall Nvidia Physx, Nvidia Graphics Driver (and anything else related to the graphics that might be in there)

step 3: reboot into safemode (hold F8 while starting up, then select the most basic safemode) and use the driver cleaning tool to clean Nvidia and Nvidia PhysX (don’t select Nvidia chipset, that’s only for motherboard drivers)

step 4: reboot again, let the computer boot normally and then run the driver installation – select the advanced / custom install mode and untick everything except the Graphics Driver and Physx, only install those 2 for now.

step 5: reboot again and re-run the Unigine Heaven benchmark

If the same problem still occurs you might have a problem with your card or there’s some other weird conflict going on.

Since you have an i7 2700 (non-K version) I assume you probably have a basic motherboard, aka one with an onboard graphics chip? If so, have you double-checked that it’s disabled? You might have to go into the BIOS to turn it off, or it may be possible to do it through the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager is on the left). Look for an Intel HD 3000 or HD 4000 graphics chip (can’t remember which one comes with what, but it’ll be one of the two) and make sure it’s disabled. It’s the only other thing I can think of that might be conflicting – otherwise you might have a hardware issue.

Bizzle.3495:

I’ve spent a fair amount of time researching my 470’s temps as well, and in a nutshell here’s what I found. The 470’s Threshhold is 105°c. Sustained heats of 100°c or more could cause damage over a long period of time. Fermi Architecture runs super hot, this is par for the course. My full load temps (>90% load) are 92°-94°c. At one point my temps were 100°-106° and I was having lock ups. After disassembling the card and cleaning the filthy stock heatsink and fan, temps went back down to low 90s.

So long story short:
low 90s, normal.
mid 90s, might need a cleaning or better ventilation/case cooling.
high 90s or over 100, watch out, this could cause damage to the card if used for long periods of time.

Please note this ONLY apply to Fermi 400 Series! The 500 and 600 have a much cooler and more power efficient architecture, and much lower heat threshholds. I can’t think of any other card on the planet that runs as hot as these without frying out.

Yep, I’ve done the same research and that about sums it up.

Some of the wild custom design cards like the MSI Twin Frozrs get better results in regards to temps and cooling, but if you’re talking about the reference design 470 and 480 cards.. yeah they run bloody hot and it’s entirely normal.

I myself have a GTX 470 SC from EVGA and on autofan it will go upto 90-95 degrees at 100% useage. So I use a custom fan profile in EVGA Precision that aims to keep the fan between 60% and 80%, which keeps the temperature at full load just under 83 degrees. I think that’s a nice compromise between heatstress and wear and tear on the fan.

Ofcourse I’ve had plenty of people tell me my card runs too hot even at 83 degrees and it’s always an uphill battle trying to explain to them that some cards just run much hotter than others and not all cards have the same temperature limits.

I will say one thing for this card though – it does a great job of heating the room in the winter.

It depends a bit on what you want to do with your friends.

If you want to play WvW with them you have to be on the same Home server, since you can only play in WvW for your own Home server. Currently while populations are still stabilizing changing your Home server is free, so if you want to team up in WvW now would be a good time to select one server and all move to it together.

If you want to play PvE together then for now you have to be on the same Home server, but the intention for the future is that PvE will be more flexible and you will be able to play on other servers as a “guest” without having to transfer there, which will allow friends and guildmates to play together even if they chose different Home servers. Arenanet haven’t given an ETA on when this “guesting” feature will be implemented, but it’s presumed that it will happen shortly after free transfers end.

For sPvP (structured PvP) I’m not 100% sure, but since sPvP is completely seperate from servers, I would imagine teaming up with your friends there is always possible even if all of you are on different Home servers.

Some games install everything from the discs “as-is” first and then connect to the patch servers to update it all, while other games use a more mashed-up approach where it can sometimes be hard to tell when they’re just copying from the discs and when they’re downloading stuff from the patch servers.

Diablo 3 was the latter for me and GW2 might be the same – I don’t know for sure, since I’m in Europe and we didn’t get any discs with the prepurchase here.

As Cheiron pointed out, you’ll have to download at least several gigs anyway because a lot of files have been added / updated since the discs were printed, but it should be significantly less than downloading everything from scratch.

edit: My point is that just because it’s trying to connect to the internet right away doesn’t mean it’s planning on ignoring the discs and downloading everything from scratch – it’s probably just trying to update the launcher (GW2.exe) file at this stage.

You can usually remove Pando Media Booster anyway, even if the game that you installed through it is still on your machine, because normally speaking it only downloads the game’s latest installer file and once you have installed from that PMB becomes useless as further updates are handled through the game’s own launcher and not Pando.

And I always suggest removing Pando as soon as you’re done with it, since it’ll continue uploading in the background for all eternity if you don’t – and while that’s nice for other users, it can cause serious connectivity issues if Pando starts aggressively hogging all your upload bandwidth. At the very least each time Pando is installed on your system you should go into it configuration menu (you can find this in the windows Control Panel -> PMB / Pando 32-bit ) and make sure the upload limit is set low enough that you always have some spare upload bandwidth left, otherwise it might throttle your connection, which can slow down browsing and make playing online games nearly impossible.

The greatest irony of Pando is that it’s such a rubbish tool it even throttles itself – back when LOTRO F2P went into beta and everyone was downloading it for the weekend a lot of people noticed speeds were atrocious, but not because of the huge number of people trying to download… no, the speeds were low because Pando was so busy uploading it was bottlenecking its OWN download speeds! If you told it to cap the upload at just a few notches below your max upload speed the download speed skyrocketed.

I run a GTX 470 SC and my experience has been that every beta driver has so far been an improvement over the last one. I did a clean install of each driver, incl. cleaning up files in safemode.

• 301.42 WHQL performance was alright for me, I was mostly running at 40-50fps, but in some areas I was stuck below 30 fps (for example the Ruins of Rin within the Black Citadel zone)

• 304.79 beta was a big improvement, it made the game feel much smoother with a lot of areas now running at 50-60fps (though Ruins of Rin was still stuck at 30-35fps)

• 306.02 beta further stabilized my fps, making nearly all areas now run at 50-60fps and reducing the severity of any fps drops – it also really cranked up the performance of the intensive areas like Ruins of Rin, which jumped up to 45-50fps, which made a world of difference.

As Grammarye suggested, it might not be a bad idea to run a CPU benchmark as well. If it overheats on that too, then I’d personally have the manufacturer look at it because that would mean even the CPU on its own just can’t handle 100% load even without any influence from the GPU, which in my book would just classify as a faulty part.

As for beta, I definitely have higher CPU useage now than I did back in BWE and the performance has gone up to match. I also remember far fewer complaints about overheating of the CPU specifically – most complaints during BWE1 were about how much GW2 taxes the GPU, not the CPU. Now that it’s actually using the CPU a lot more that’s changed as well.

That the laptop isn’t overheating when you run off the battery is pretty typical, since by default laptops will go into power-saving mode and the components will be running at much lower clockspeeds, which both reduces the performance and also the temps.

I’d say that overheating whilst running off the AC is also not that strange, since GW2 pushes both the GPU and CPU combined much harder than any other MMO I’ve seen. Now the GPU being pushed hard is not uncommon – SWTOR, Rift and some others at max settings can push that to 100% as well. However the CPU I’ve never seen used this intensively before outside of benchmarks and stresstests.

Just to give an idea, I run an i5 2500k @ 3.3ghz and other MMO’s (heck other games in general) don’t push it over 40-50% useage in total and the spread is usually a high load on 1 or 2 cores and much lower loads on the rest – GW2 is the first game I’ve played that will take my CPU upto 70-80% load and not just in total, that’s actually 70-80% on EACH individual core – it’s the most even load spread I’ve ever seen for a video game.

What this means is that GW2 seems to be able to tax all cores quite evenly, which means on slightly less high end CPU’s the cores may all be maxed out or very close to it, which means they’re approaching benchmark stresstest levels and kicking out a ton of heat. If the CPU is in a laptop which also happens to have a GPU chip squashed into the same tiny compartment which is ALSO running at extremely high useage and kicking out a ton of heat… then you’re in a scenario where it’s really easy for something to start overheating after any prolonged playing session, especially the CPU which usually has a lower temperature threshold.

The only things I can recommend are getting a cooling pad and cleaning out the vents with a can of compressed air. If that doesn’t help there might not be much you can do short of forcibly underclocking your CPU so it doesn’t get so hot.

PS: sorry for the after-edits, I had to post my reply half-finished because the forum’s reply window had screwed up.