Guild Wars 2

You would gain a massively gigantic gain in performance with an i7 4770 or 4770k/4790K over the FX-6300. I’m even going to go out on a limb and say your performance will double in most areas.

The performance you’re seeing with an AMD FX-8120 and the performance increase you’d see with the 8350 would still be in the laughable department. I used an 8350 until round January 2014 starting from when I bought the game on May 5th and at first I thought it was great but I immediately picked up that the 8350 was not performing as well as I was lead on to believe because of AMD’s HORRIBLE marketing ploys for the FX line.

Defiance, another MMO is a huge example of CPU dependency. I started that game with a Phenom 2 quad core 975 BE and for the most part it ran it fairly well. I change to the FX-8350 and the performance was substantially worse. Then after a while I try it on my new 4770K and there’s not a single stutter anywhere ever.

When I used the 8350 for Guild Wars 2, the best I could get when just for lols purposes see how much FPS I can get by changing all settings to low and finding a spot with hardly any visual or CPU hard stuff, I got 180 fps and on the 4770K, I broke 320 doing the same thing. In WVW, I’ve seen the FPS for the 8350 drop to as low as a half frame per second. Yes, the number actually read ZERO. That was when it was Sanctum Of Rall, Jade Quarry and Black Gate. It was far from spectacular because it was literally a slideshow for me.

I don’t do wvw anymore but the largest player event I’ve been in since would likely be tequatl fights. At those the lowest FPS I’ve seen with the AMD was 2 fps. The intel, I think I stayed about 20 (I play on 5760×1080 at max settings turned off shadows and reflections for it, otherwise I have all of the eyecandy on since for what I do there isn’t really anything that can drop it now)

I think you’d be better off buying something like an Intel i5 4690K and a new board. Costs more than just buying an FX-8350 yes, but it’ll still perform better in games and Guild Wars 2 especially. Not to mention this thing where some games are ‘optimized’ for AMD FX… I still got better performance using an Intel on them.

sirsquishy.8531:

Avelos.6798:

Intel HD 4000 can actually do pretty good for Guild Wars 2. It’s the part that it’s an Intel CPU that’s important. Generally medium settings without shadows or reflections should get you as good as 45 FPS. 1366×768 resolution will also help.

Also the RAM, completely forgot about the RAM.

If your running 1 stick of RAM in that laptop you are running Single Channel and are crippling the HD4000. You should be running 2 Memory sticks in Dual Channel mode.

Additionally, The Fastest CL9 ram you can get will also give a slight performance increase, since the IGP uses system RAM to operate.

with laptops nowadays it’s probably a standard to have two sticks in there even if differing size. Though if the laptop has 4 slots, then I would imagine at least two would be populated.

Intel HD 4000 can actually do pretty good for Guild Wars 2. It’s the part that it’s an Intel CPU that’s important. Generally medium settings without shadows or reflections should get you as good as 45 FPS. 1366×768 resolution will also help.

vespers.1759:

Avelos.6798:

I’d go with the intel because it’s an overall better experience in everything than just games. That certainly is the case for me with the 4770K and the 8350. Don’t waste your time or money on the AMD imo. They have their perks, but the price on some of them is misleading. Poorly advertised or advertised as something they are not.

This post is one of the dumbest things i’ve ever seen. you’re seriously comparing a $180 cpu to a $340 cpu? well kitten for almost twice the price of the 8350 i sure hope the 4770k is better.

when you compare the amd cpus to their equivalent price intel cpus the amds are the clear winner in value for money.

When you’re looking at Guild Wars 2, the same priced Intel to the AMD crap is vastly superior. I’d rather pay the higher price for something I know now with first hand experience will be better.

And let’s look at it in a different way; Top of the line AMD FX 8350 (not including the FX-9 because it’s just an overclocked 8350 anyway) to top of the line mainstream Intel 4770K and it’s better in every way that matters to a gamer.

Consider this, too. An Ivybridge i3 still slaps an FX-8350 around in Guild Wars. Much more when it’s overclocked to like 4.2 GHz such as the one that a buddy of mine has.

But if you want to prefer AMD because of just it’s price alone then feel free to live in the non-existent, virtual reality where AMD is actually better than Intel because that’s the only place they’d be better.

If you’re set on a laptop, don’t get one with a GPU any lower than a GTX 765M. The 760M is an incredibly neutered chip. The 765M is one step higher than a GTX 670Mx which still performs fairly well.

I’d go with the intel because it’s an overall better experience in everything than just games. That certainly is the case for me with the 4770K and the 8350. Don’t waste your time or money on the AMD imo. They have their perks, but the price on some of them is misleading. Poorly advertised or advertised as something they are not.

Intel i5. Would go for the 4690K for the overclocking too.

Going from an AMD Phenom 2 to an i7 4790K you will see a large jump in performance I think. I saw a huge jump from FX-8350 to 4770K.

R9 295X2 will not do anything for Guild Wars 2 if you’re already using a GTX 590. My recommendation? Keep using the 590.

Higher minimum frames per second in crowded player events? Needs a better CPU or overclock your 3820K.
Game crashing from lack of RAM? Get 8 GB or minimize what’s using it in the background.
Want lower load speed times? Grab an SSD and throw Guild Wars 2 on it.

Both graphics cards are completely overkill for Guild Wars 2. I don’t mean to be rude or anything at all but this topic is pretty pointless since it’s now fairly common knowledge that a GTX 660 and Radeon HD 7850 (or 7790) are the cheapest solutions for Guild Wars 2 at 1080P with a slight amount of headroom.

With an Intel processor, multi GPU performance doesn’t drop much if at all, not in my experience.

Fermi.2409:

try putting the game in 1600×900 if that computer goes up to 1920×1080.

Don’t do this, resolution is the absolute last thing you should turn down- drop all of the other settings all the way before choosing to go to a lower res to try and get a good framerate.

I dunno about that. I think Sirsquishy did that with one of his laptops and the frames are better.

should get medium-to-high out of it. It’ll slog through world versus world zerg fights and world boss events but otherwise it should do alright.

Keep Shadows and Reflections off, try putting the game in 1600×900 if that computer goes up to 1920×1080. If it goes up to 1366×768 then don’ worry about that, though you’ll might want to try the small user interface so it’s not so cluttered at that point.

The latest BIOS revision of the Maximus 6 allows it to support the Devil’s Canyon iteration, the real tock in the Intel ‘Tick-Tock’ chain. Haswell to Broadwell is more of a “Tick-ety-Tock” with the ety being Devil’s Canyon.

Well I know from top to bottom the three PCIe slots on the Formula 6 are 16, 8, and 4. Beyond this I’m unsure what you can do.

Well hey there buddy! We both have the same motherboard!

And as for crossfire, Crossfire supports Guild Wars 2, but Guild Wars 2 at times may not support crossfire. If you’re running the game windowed then it’ll only use 1 chip out of the two and a little bit of the second one at times. Though for me, it uses both of my R9 290Xs about the same with the 5760×1080 resolution I’m driving and with maximum settings.

I don’t expect it to be a turbo boost issue. My 4770K sometimes bounces between 3.5 GHz and 3.9 Ghz and I don’t see an issue. It may be your PCIe bus. A simple thing I know of that can work is to re-seat the graphics card or even re-seat it multiple times to ‘clean the connectors’ so they connect 100%. Beyond that I’m not sure how to get it into X16. Both of my R9 290Xs run in X8 but that’s because the i7 of mine only has 16 lanes. I think that’s it? Not sure. But X8 lane is the best most graphics cards can use. Not very often does a single chip graphics card benefit from being in X16 mode.

Since Dual Layer DVDs can hold up to 8.7 GB, I’d assume the install from the DVDs themselves is around up to 19~ GB. Then there’s around 4-6 GB of updates (4 GB when I first got it) post install.

If you don’t have frame limiter or Vsync enabled, it would then depend on what you’re doing to be able to classify 50 frames per second as ‘normal’

That is indeed strange. I have a friend with a Radeon HD 6990 and an Intel Ivybridge i3 clocked at 4.2 GHz and plays this game just fine at max I think.

What you’re experiencing is indeed local on your computer and nothing to do with your connection.

Judging by saying that your CPU is hitting around 30-40% max use and the graphics card about 60%, I’d wager that your CPU is being down-clocked by something either in a software setting or it is hardware related. I got a few things however you can try to be sure, however.

Have you checked that your CPU is not throttling when it shouldn’t be?
Have you checked to make sure there’s no dust restricting airflow?
Have you checked that the 6990 is not throttling from overheating or dust in fan (same thing) ?
Have you tried using GPU-Z to check and see that the card is operating at X16 lanes on PCIe 2.0? It should be operating at X16 lanes given that that’s a dual chip graphics card. Though I’m not sure how it’d do on X8. Can’t imagine it being too much of a difference.
Did you check to see that maybe the machine had switched spontaneously switched to a power plan that reduced processing and or graphics performance?

There is also giving the -repair function command on the GW2.exe I think. I’m not entirely sure how you do that but it seems to have worked for people previously.

Yeah it’s your GPU a little bit but it’s mainly how the game works. Even with a more modern gaming card you’d still see around the same drops. Best you can really do is overclock the snot out of that processor and have like a GTX 660 or something or Radeon HD 6870.

You can’t really do much with the Radeon HD 5700 series cards, they can overclock but only slightly before they just blow up on you. I’ve used a 5770 before and it did not overclock well at all. Many factory overclocked units suffered the same— users saying that when they dropped them to reference card clocks all was fine so I think OC-ing yours would likely be out of the question.

I’m not sure what you’re gonna do about the BIOS thing but your best bet would be overclocking your CPU. However you can jump to a more modern gaming card since the 5700 series is pretty old by now. In which case, I’d recommend something like an R9 270/270X or a GTX 750TI/760. All four cards good value for the money.

The BIOS though you should be able to get into it. Maybe a BIOS update will fix your problem. You’d have to do some research on it.

Even still, however if you had something like a GTX 660TI whch is probably one of the best used cards for Guild Wars 2 and overclocked say to 4 GHz you’d still have some wicked FPS drops. My specs are in my signature and I’m not too far off from your numbers.

I checked out a video from LinusTehcTips and he compared the MSI TwinFrozr 270X with a reference 270 and the reference one OC’d higher than the Twin Frozr which is where I got my own information so I’m not so sure.

[Edit]
My mistake it was a Twin Frozr 270 compared to a reference 270X. Both had the multiple pin connections and the 270 OC’d higher. Granted being non reference this is to be expected but the two cards otherwise save for clocks were the exact same specs on paper.

I always say this but if you look at the R9 270X and the 270, the 270 is by far the better deal because it’s exactly the same spec as the 270X, just clocked lower so you can OC that thing a little and get better performance without paying for it.

Do some research though this might not be true for all 270s.

Hey I guest to Tarnished Coast to participate in a guild’s missions now and whenever they start them, the guild mission sub panel is completely blank with no information and has been doing this for the past number of weeks. It’ll show the weekly mission progress thing, but in the Active Missions section, there’s nothing.

I don’t know if this is a bug or not but but if it’s not a bug, it’s pretty dumb to be a thing in this game.

That must load considerably longer than it would on a hard drive.

Any of these tgraphics cards are better than the GTX 460 but out of the three, the GTX 760 is clearly the fastest. Every GPU will handle what you need- it’s the CPU that counts though.

I recommend exploring less complex options first which would be trying out the High Performance power profile setting found in Control Panel. Any game capable laptop should be set to High Performance (while being plugged in too because they die fast at that point) or whatever power option it changes to when plugged in if it’s a performance mode. Such as Asus notebooks. They have a Power4Gear profile setting for power saving and entertainment which is basically power saver and high performance modes that change automatically depending on if the charger is plugged in and or not working.

Change the resolution to 1600×900, turn off shadows and turn off reflections. It should run much better after that and give a try to uhhh… character limit to medium if it’s not already. Also change the Render Sampling to Native if it is not already.

Sorry? I must have never noticed that.

I copy the game from my desktop to my laptops at home and they all play just fine.

A better graphics card would be the first place to start but if suddenly you land yourself with $600-700, I’d go for a whole new computer.

It’ll do fine. I mention multiple times every now and then that two of my friends have tried the game on Ivy i3 and i5 laptops both having Intel HD 4000 and on medium the game played fairly well. An i7 dual core with a dedicated graphics card like the GT750M should do substantially better. Won’t be the greatest performance but it’ll be playable and enjoyable for most things excluding world versus world and possibly high player count events like world bosses which will certainly see fps drops.

Moving on, if you get that laptop, upgrade it straight to 8.1. Even with a mouse windows 8.1 is extremely easy to use.

well, for a USB flash drive thing NTFS is the way to go.

I think when GPU load is not at maximum for this game, the CPU is not feeding it to max potential. Check for CPU throttling.

I don’t find any of those high overclocks with cores and hyperthreading disabled to be good. If it’s not realistic, it’s garbage. Also I thought I had read an article about some guys using an MSI board to hit 6.5 with the Pentium.

Most cases ship with them. It’s mainly to cancel out vibrations from anything on the computer and to keep it from sliding around. I’d wager that it’s most likely the fan on the radiator of your alienware. What I’d first do is research people having similar experiences and looking at what they did. Chances are people just switched out for a quieter air cooler or researched quieter fan models. That’s exactly what I’m going to do with my liquid cooler if I don’t upgrade it— get quieter Corsair brand fans.

Let’s just put it this way. The record overclock for the Pentium G3258 is 6.5 GHz on air cooling. 4.6 will be no problem for a Hyper 212 Evo but an H80i will keep that sucker nice and happy. And I’d bet that even at 5.4 GHz the Pentium G3258 would lay the smack down on that FX junk.

FAT32 device? Just reformat it into NTFS. FAT32 is just a compatibility setting for older computers and if the oldest computer you have is say Vista or later XP, you don’t need FAT32.

sobe.4157:

The only things making noise in the setup is fans, hard drive, and pump. A radiator in an liquid cooling unit, unlike water cooling setups a reservoir is built into that radiator, but aside from moving water/liquid, rads make 0 noise.

If you include the RAD as in fan on the RAD as well, then it does make noise. a fan pulling air through it and being as close as they usually are can get pretty audible.

Are you referring to the one directly on the motherboard itself?

Pulling cold air or warm air from the system it’s going to make very little difference. I’ve been using my H100 for over two years and noticed this a lot. Heat from my system only ever pushed up the temperature maybe a couple degrees.

If your 2600K is only operating at a maximum of 31c, I highly recommend leaving it alone.

Neither of which will happen.

Both of which are terrible in this game ha.

I only ever got that low of FPS on 1920×1080 with an AMD processor for this game so I already know that the CPU is likely an AMD FX.

I have two Logitech MX518. That should sum up my response.

It is the processor. It is the bottleneck. I had an FX-8350 and had the exat same problem. Since changed to the i7 4770K without regret.

Riku.4821:

Okay then, lastly my PC runs 24-31C min-Max, I am assuming this is good? (when playing a game).
I believe I can manually change the PCI and Hardrive fan and perhaps the system fan. Or leave them all on auto.

31c is maximum is like what my i7 4770K idles at LOL That’s downright awesome.

As a CPU reliant game, more speed is more fps. I’d leave the i7 alone. Get your money’s worth out of that CPU. Waste of performance and money spent to try and configure it to act like an Intel i3. As for the game ‘not really using 3rd and 4th core,’ it’s not exactly like that. It generates enough work for three cores, but with an intel CPU on this game, it basically turns into, more fast cores, better performance. Even a 6 core i7 performs better than an quad core i7, even if slightly. You can try all you want with what you feel could help, I’m not too knowledgeable. I only recently came out of AMD processors to my 4770K. Still though I think you should be thankful for how loud that PC is not. :P Mine’s guaranteed twice or thrice as loud.

The liquid cooler you probably can’t configure unless the fan is plugged in to the motherboard. Then you can maybe change the RPM phases.

Tip: If you go with building a tower, never cheap out on a PSU. Never go for anything that does not have an 80+ certification.

Not to mention I don’t think that spec list needs the Evo 212. I mean, it’s a Pentium processor. It doesn’t need it. Switching from tray to box is more beneficial

An Alienware. I can tell by the fan on that one sink on the motherboard without looking at the second picture haha. One of my friends has the exact same thing but with a GTX 560 and i5 2300. That computer should be fairly quiet as it is then. My friend’s alienware is in an unhealthy spot which means it doesn’t get much air so the fans ramp up a lot but even then it’s not really noticeable. If your XFX was a reference card it would be 4 times louder than it would ever get. I know those Double D coolers though. Very popular among other brands. Very quiet, very effective. The only thing I can see making noise is the radiator. I have a Corsair H100 and their mechanics is pretty much the same just I have 240mm of area coverage instead of just 120 and that’s the most noticeable thing on my PC now beyond the graphics card running high fan speeds. The RAD looks clean

Most gaming headsets won’t really cancel out noise until you’re gaming. My Creative Labs Sound Blaster Tactic 3D Alpha is like that.

Learning that your Radeon HD 7970 XFX unit has the Double D cooler on it, you don’t need to lower the values for the frequencies in Catalyst Control Center. It generally runs quiet anyway. I probably already said this but I think you’re just hearing the noise of the radiator keeping your i7 at a healthy happy temperature.

I decided to give out the Razer Gamebooster app a try now finally. I tried out the original and it just stank of malware but the razer version (despite being the same but with a different skin) makes me feel a bit more comfortable. The default settings gave me a slight boost even with a 4770K. I bet it can be tweaked further.