Guild Wars 2

OC cards are priced a bit higher to cover the warranty costs for failures. So it is in the manufacturer’s self interest to make sure those parts are stable at those speeds. eVGA has a 3 year warranty on all their cards.

So what’s better for the end user? OCing themselves (because even stock clock cards come with the tools to do it but you void your warranty) or buy one that the manufacturer OCs themselves and stands by it with a warranty for $10 more MSRP?

The exchange price is determined by how many gems we player buy from the exchange which started with a fix number of gems. Only gems that get added are ones that players sell to the exchange for gold. Fewer gems in the exchange, the higher the price goes.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Wait, so what you’re saying is that we players should always be under the impression that the company is allowing others to cheat the system? There isn’t enough tin foil to make a hat that big.

The difference between the K version of the i5 and the i7 is negligible (<5%) in most games, especially if you overclock. The $100 you save you can use for better cooling, video card or straight up savings.

The increase from 6 to 8MB of L3 cache between the i5 and i7 is to support hyper threading better since two simultaneous threads per core are forced to share the L1 and L2 caches which don’t increase. With less cache per thread means a greater chance of misses in these two caches.

Calls for an i7 on a build with only a reasonable budget is from those who drunk the kool aid. As I said before that the money is better spent, in general for a gaming platform, on a better graphics card. Unless you also plan to do work work on it an the apps you use for that are designed to scale with cores, or if your budget is over $1000 US in which case only then I would direct you to an i7.

In either case, i5 or i7, latest gen is the best so socket 1150 MB with a Haswell CPU.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i5-4670k-4670-4570-4430_5.html#sect0

We’ve always regarded Core i5 series CPUs as a good choice for building a high-performance gaming computer. The transition to the Haswell microarchitecture doesn’t change anything in this respect. They are fast enough to accompany a modern graphics card, so the frame rates are almost the same in most games in the Full-HD resolution. It means the frame rate is limited by the graphics card rather than by the CPU. As for their perspectives in future applications, the low-resolution results suggest that the Haswell generation is somewhat better than the Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge. However, the senior LGA1150 processor Core i7-4770K is still better than the Core i5-4670K. Many recently released shooters, e.g. Metro: Last Light and Hitman: Absolution, support multithreading, so the Core i7 enjoys an advantage thanks to its Hyper-Threading technology. There are also examples to the contrary, though. Hyper-Threading has a negative effect in the racing sim F1 2012 where the Core i7 series are inferior to their less expensive cousins.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7189/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-september-2013/10

In direct comparison, only two benchmarks had more than a 3.5% FPS jump with the 4770K in favor, and one actually in favor of the 4670K.

So in terms of answering the question, for our benchmarks, it would seem that the i5-4670K is the more cost effective choice in buying a Haswell processor.

abomally.2694:

Also, I don’t recommend buying a factory overclocked graphics card (OC).

Why pray tell?

Everyone can be super! And when everyone’s super… [chuckles evilly] no one will be.

Consoles are always easier to program than PCs, advantage of dedicated hardware and knowing the limitations up front. Everyone has the same CPU and GPU.

Again it’s not an AMD thing. It’s a multi-threaded thing. To scale with number of cores you need to be able to split up the workload evenly to get the scaling from additional cores. Easy for a ray trace, scientific or video compression apps, not so easy for everything else and that includes gaming.

Multiple your CPU usage % by the number of cores and if that number is around 3 then everything is normal because not all software has enough work that can occupy all the cores available. It’s not an AMD vs Intel thing, it’s a false belief that all software can use, or be structured to use, all cores in a CPU. An Intel core is much faster than a single FX core. And since no thread (programs are composed of one or more threads) can’t exceed the performance of a single core, Intel thumps AMD FX when there’s only 3 or so cores worth of work available.

Because nobody has proven insider info leaking. It’s your claim, you have to provide the positive proof because it’s impossible to prove a negative.

What’s better for you? Coin from vending or selling at the TP or mats, runes/sigils and luck? And you can still sell the mats and rune/sigil on the TP or vend them.

Or 3.8 gold per dollar. A lot better than the 0.5 gold per dollar a year a go.

Dusk today is 794g where a year ago it was 371g. Wait that means it’s cheaper now to buy the weapon with cash that it was a year ago. It’s only 30% of what it was in dollars a year ago. What savings!

Salvaging ectos for T6 dust helped the economy greatly as T6 dust is used to create T6 mats from T5 mats. And we all know that T6 anything isn’t in great supply. Yes it raised the price of ectos and with it rare gear level 68 to 80 as an ecto supply. And of course it lowered the price of T6 dust and may have lowered the price slightly on T6 mats but likely conversions were for personal purposes and not marketed. Limited to no profit in it.

And honestly I glad they did because that upheaval is where I made what limited gold I have before the market stabilized. Same true with the elimination of Traveler gear for Dire.

But that’s not wide spread manipulation. That’s not “all prices in the game”. And it wasn’t them that set the price, they just adjusted supply by providing a means for players to produce T6 dust from a price depressed rare material.

I’m sure the introduction of luck in blues and greens is another example of ANet messing with “all prices in the game” by simply providing a purpose for junk that most players were either already salvaging, vending and in rare cases selling at the TP. As a source of luck, including ectos, I imagine there were spikes in their prices as well as the over supply dried up. Haven’t looked myself. But again all that ANet did was introduce a new purpose for items we already have and the shift in prices were player driven. Blame ourselves in being too greedy wanting to up our MF % as fast as possible.

Increased actual demand raises prices and in turn sucks more gold out of the economy due to the TP fees/taxes. So who made out on all this? Everyone gets blue and green drops all the time. Now we can if we want actually sell them in short order for reasonable prices to players who mine them for luck if we don’t want them for ourselves. Ecto prices were highly depressed before the T6 dust change but had already started to go back down when they added luck to the results and now prices have gone up again. That raises the price of rare gear which raises the cost in trying to MF a precursor.

But that’s how economies work. Demand shifts due to new uses of existing materials and the next thing you know markets shake up. Learn to spot the shifts as they are happening and you too can make some coin. Or you can sit on the sidelines and complain about how everything is getting more and more expensive. Well actually only very few items have shifted in price by any large amount.

I guess I can understand why you think ANet is moving the carrot on you. It’s just that your timing is poor.

Amun Ra.6435:

And to the bold part of your response…Yeah, like that happens…ever.

Example please? Yes need an explanation since I don’t see the conspiracies that you see.

Prove that morrolan. How is ANet manipulating the TP?

And if you want to spend real money or lots of gold there is always the BLTC chests via keys. On rare occasions you get something worth it.

Otherwise it’s the Mystic Forge aka the Mystic Toilet aka the Mystic Slot Machine. While there are recipes you can use with the MF, most players simply toss in stuff they don’t want hoping to get something the do. Most players leave disappointed.

Any newly introduced gear that can be considered better than exotic in stats or unique in look and can be crafted will be time gated.

What holds up legendary weapons is getting the precursor. The rarity of drops is the “time gate” however the super wealthy can buy the precursor off the market. With the new time gated gear the opposite is true. You have to be the game for the long term.

The primary purpose of the Gem Exchange is for players to provide the gold other players will get when they sell their Gems. This way neither gold or gems are created by the exchange once it was established.

The Gem Exchange was not meant as the preferred method to procure Gems, buying them with cash is, like the proxy cash shop in nearly every other MMO. They don’t call it a cash shop because it takes Monopoly money.

Which is why most budget minded DIYers stop at an i5 and ignore the i7. Sadly some decisions Intel made with the heat sink on later models have made it more difficult to overclock by similar amounts without dangerous surgery making the i5-2500K a great CPU. Sadly the last of them have been shipped a month ago. No more in the pipeline.

loseridoit.2756:

Behellagh.1468:

Still that doesn’t mean it sucks. E-350/450 or E1-1500, they suck.

when a processor is bad, then it really very relative.

bulldozer came out when intel released the i5 2500k. i5-2500k is an amazing processor that can almost keep to current processors5Ghz overclocked on air.

No it came out 9-ish months later (Jan 2011 vs Oct 2011). Likely they were trying to beat the i7-9xx series which came out in Nov 2008. It takes years to design a CPU from scratch. And when they pick a target, they aren’t looking at what crazy overclocking kids are doing.

And they succeeded, with the FX-8150 beating the i7 975 by 24%. It’s just Intel didn’t sit still and came out with a new “tick” that’s 35% faster, the i7-2600K. AMD knew they “lost” 9 months before roll out. AMD responds a year later with the FX-8350 but Intel again beat them with a “tock” 6 months before. And now before the next variation of the Bulldozer architecture Intel ups the game again with the next “tick” just 4 months ago.

Intel so far is staying a step ahead of AMD with AMD playing catch up. But the fundamental difference between the two remain. When running fewer core’s worth of work, Intel simply outperforms AMD by a wide margin which AMD only gets close when both CPUs are fully being used. And until games start utilizing more cores fully, Intel will be the choice if a game is being limited by the CPU.

Chyanne Waters.8719:

I am not asking that I am asking because AMD uses hypertransport can the fps numbers be inaccurate? Since Guild wars 2 seems to prefer hyperthreading

Hypertransport is a bus the ties the CPU to the motherboard northbridge chip on an AMD platform. Hyperthreading is the ability of an Intel core to run two threads at the same time on one core.

Yes, you had “Zombies.” But this is “Zombie Redneck Torture Family.” Entirely separate thing. It’s like the difference between an elephant and an elephant seal.

Anyways it’s just the opposite with Hyperthreading. An Intel core can run single thread much faster, nearly double, where AMD having a core per thread simply can’t double it’s clock speed. So in an environment when there aren’t a lot of threads running, using up a lot of “cores” (from the OS’s point of view), Intel simply out runs it.

Fine, I still have the charts up. Let me include the CPU we were “discussing” on the other thread as well as the i7-2600K.

Athlon II X2 250 – PCMark: 3201 – CineBench: 1.72 – Crysis II: 52.9
Athlon II X4 640 – PCMark: 3451 – CineBench: 3.36 – Crysis II: 86.6
FX-8120 – PCMark: 3987 – CineBench: 5.10 – Crysis II: 99.6
FX-8350 – PCMark: 4538 – CineBench: 6.94 – Crysis II: 116.2
i7-2600K – PCMark: 4817 – CineBench: 6.83 – Crysis II: 120.0
I7-3770K – PCMark: 5360 – CineBench: 7.91 – Crysis II: 122.4

If we compare the FX to the i7-3770K we get with the -8120 that the i7 is 1.34x faster in PCMark, 1.55x in CineBench and 1.29x in Crysis II. With the -8350 the numbers are PCMark 1.18x, CineBench 1.14x and Crysis II 1.05x while when compared to the i7-2600K we see 1.06x, 0.98x and 1.03×. Windows see all four CPUs as supporting 8 threads at the same time so the playing field is as level as it’s going to get comparing games.

If a game is GPU bound, like Metro/Crysis, then CPU brand won’t make a difference. However once it’s not, then Intel pulls ahead a lot more often than not. If a problem can’t easy be split into a bunch of equal sized parts then throwing cores isn’t going to cause it to scale linearly to cores available.

There may be many minor things that the main code could split off and check back when it’s done, that doesn’t automatically means significant performance improvements if the main code simply ends up waiting for the other thread to get done before proceeding or those other threads don’t take long to do their work. And if threads are fighting for the same resource like the hard drive, you aren’t going to get much scaling at all.

Sadly most SMP benchmarks are with apps designed to scale well. I think this causes some misconceptions about how powerful the CPU is with normal apps. That’s why you don’t see a huge disparity between PCMark scores compared with a SMP task like CineBench.

Pulling from TomsHardware charts.

Athlon II X2 250 – PCMark: 3201 – CineBench: 1.72 – Crysis II: 52.9
Athlon II X4 640 – PCMark: 3451 – CineBench: 3.36 – Crysis II: 86.6
I7-3770K – PCMark: 5360 – CineBench: 7.91 – Crysis II: 122.4

So thats 1.67x with PCMark and 4.6x with CineBench between low end Athlon dual core and high end i7 (1.08x and 1.95x between the Athlons) . So guess which end of the spectrum games fall? Crysis II here is tested at low settings and resolution to emphasis CPU impact and we see 2.31x between the Athlon dual core and the i7 and 1.64x between the Athlon dual and quad. While the ramp from 2 to 4 cores is evident in games it’s nowhere near 4x we see in SMP apps and much closer to 2x if that.

So while you can go look at Passmark and say “I have a powerful CPU see it roar”, in a lot of apps that potential simply isn’t being used and is difficult for an average single app to use. Running multiple active apps, great way to use all that power, single apps, not so much.

Still that doesn’t mean it sucks. E-350/450 or E1-1500, they suck.

That was another one I missed too.

There’s a “new” waypoint in the top left of snowden drifts, added for guild missions. SW a little bit from the Scholar’s Cleft Waypoint.

Can’t tell if you found the JP in Lonar’s Pass, Griffenrook Run. Underwater entrance, pretty hard to find.

He’s using the Pounds symbol, £, for both. Euro is €. I assume he mistyped.

So Sorudo you are referring to the Gem Exchange. How can it be manipulated by players, even rich ones? Rates have to go up around 39% for someone who converted gold to gems to convert back to gold to make a profit. It rarely goes up that quickly in the short term (as in a month or less). It’s much more lucrative to flip in TP with your capital than invest in gems long term.

Anyways the major spikes in the exchange rate occurs when highly desirable items appear or go on sale at the Gem Shop. That’s more of an indication of players being cheap than some grand market manipulation scheme.

Crypze.6571:

Why do i (a norwegian) have to pay more money for gems than a guy from United Kingdom(+all other countries)? 8k gems = 100£ for Norway, 8k gems = 85£ for United Kingdom.

Please give me an answer.

https://www.google.com/search?q=euro+to+pound&oq=euro+to+pound&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.4137j0j7&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#es_sm=93&espv=210&q=100+euros+to+pounds

Looks right to me. 100 Euros outside of UK, about 85 Pounds for UK (UK chose not to go to Euros).

Squeesidhe.4761:

Behellagh.1468:

Maybe because I don’t sell things at 900MPH but I never get this. It’s like trying to open a combination lock quickly. Too easy to overshoot forcing you to start again making it take just as long or longer than if you simply took your time.

So if you know selling item after item quickly will eventually cause that message, slow down. A little time versus what looks like a lot of annoyance and frustration.

OK, that is really silly. I’m not trying to be antagonistic. But if the solution is “don’t sell massive stacks of stuff too quickly,” that’s no solution at all.

Maybe it’s because I don’t sell off massive stacks of stuff but I do sell dozens of individual items at a time and I don’t simply choose high bid/low sell. I don’t sell off the inventory out in the field but at a TP contact, city or zone. The extra coin I make setting my sell prices offsets the 5 extra minutes of not plunging back out into the field for more loot. Actually most of my income comes from TP buying/salvaging and MF upconverting. Maybe if I was a dungeon runner or champ farmer I would feel different.

Also it can’t be a bot prevention mechanism because bots can be programmed to be patient. So this leads me to believe the problem lies with the browser/server front end of the TP and the TP DB and player DB. First rule of DB club is do everything in your power not to screw up the customer data in your database. If that means being so careful that the act of removing items from player inventory to the TP DB and making sure the link between the two DB is solid, so be it. And considering the TP is tracking 100s of thousands of items, many being added and removed within 24 hours and tracked between all the servers, both NA and EU, hate to see the index file at the end of a month.

That said are EU players more likely to see this? After all the EU has their own game servers and therefore I expect the player DB for them are also in the EU while the TP DB is in the US. If that’s the case could trans Atlantic delays contribute?

Buying Gems with cash is this game’s lifeblood. It keeps the game running the same way monthly subscriptions does in WoW.

According to the OP’s logic then subscription based games should lower their monthly price as well and we know that isn’t going to happen.

As for prices in the Gem Shop, well that’s determined by retail 101 and when an item’s popularity drops … SALE, followed by a return to it’s previous price a few days/weeks later. Boards would explode if the gem price of an item is ever raised so conversely the act of lowering a price would be permanent and something that would have to be carefully considered.

As for the 5 slots cheaper from a new game than buying slots, well I hope you can keep track of all your e-mail addresses because they would let you have two accounts connected to the same e-mail address.

Maybe because I don’t sell things at 900MPH but I never get this. It’s like trying to open a combination lock quickly. Too easy to overshoot forcing you to start again making it take just as long or longer than if you simply took your time.

So if you know selling item after item quickly will eventually cause that message, slow down. A little time versus what looks like a lot of annoyance and frustration.

TooBz.3065:

The rules about what you can and cannot salvage are ridiculous.

You can’t salvage armor or trinkets from temples.
You can salvage armor, but not weapons, from dungeons.
You can’t salvage anything from the WvW vendor.

Really? Is this necessary. Why make everything so throwaway?

Why are you buying all this Karma/Dungeon/WvW Currency gear and then not using it? For the most part people buy it for the looks and use them as skins.

For the most part if you paid coin for it or it was dropped, you can salvage it.

GW2.DAT

Size: 16.9GB (18,231,752,981)
Size on disk: 16.9GB (18,231,762,944)

Edit: Installed from DVD December 4th. Haven’t reinstalled.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me but I still do dynamic events all the time.

Contact support.

The three sets are at the Gem store. One light, one medium and one heavy. Maybe you should have researched a bit before picking.

Depends. If I’m short on playing time I will go them. If I have plenty of time then I simply play and toward the end of my play session, if I haven’t gotten the daily then I’ll go polish it off.

As in GPU-Z is reporting the PCIe width to the graphics card is x1? That’s nothing the game can affect.

The ? next to bus interface in GPU-Z launches a little graphics app that should take it out of idle.

Low 60s. Everything green and blue get salvaged. I sell ectos.

Edit: 65 from luck, now that I finally got the monthly.

It’s not out of date, just not tuned for maximum performance, especially at the stage when loads of players are present.

Drawback of home brewed Vs licensed.

That’s the problem and I don’t know of an easy solution. There is a little ? next to Bus Interface you can press that and see if it improves (GPU-Z’s suggestion). Otherwise power down the computer and reseat the card (pull it and put it back in). Also check your motherboard manual to make sure that is truly a x16 slot and not one that changes if you add additional PCIe cards (like sound). We had a few people here who had placed their video card in a slot that looks like a full x16 slot put electrically was not. Normally the slot closest to the CPU is the full x16 slot.

What does GPU-Z see? Is the PCIe bus still at x16 (Bus Interface, graphics card tab)? Is the GPU frequency normal or throttled (sensors tab)?

mrauls.6519:

Behellagh.1468:

Assuming you are using WASD to move about then F is a nearby key to attach to all interactions to. Just as V is dodge and R is run.

Did you read the post

Doesn’t matter, that’s the logic as to why it’s the way it is. Better than the enter key or mouse only as I’ve seen in other MMOs. It’s an action-y MMO so FPS logic rules.

Yes it sucks sometimes if you want to rez first/loot second or talk to NPC and not trigger the Fun Box someone dropped on them but 99% of the time you only have one choice of action.

NCSOFT’s EU branch is out of UK and they have a 20% VAT. Prices aren’t out of wack when compared to console prices. Trotting out one of my posts on that.

That’s basically the ratio that everyone uses. Just check out the prices for the next gen consoles.

XBox One – $499.99, £429.99, €499.99 – 1 to 0.86 to 1
PS4 – $399, £349, €399 – 1 to 0.875 to 1
GW2 – $50, £42.50, €50 – 1 to 0.85 to 1

It’s to cover VAT, exchange rate fees and currency fluctuation. If anything GW2 favors the UK more than Microsoft or Sony.

Asura follows Girl Genius rules.

“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”

http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205

Assuming you are using WASD to move about then F is a nearby key to attach to all interactions to. Just as V is dodge and R is run.

Which is why I use crudes on blues and basic on greens (on the off chance I get a good rune/sigil).

Yes but the FX is clocked faster than the Phenom II making up the difference. I don’t care about clock speed or IPC, just end user performance for the price.

That said yes the 1st gen Bulldozer CPUs had clock speed limitations which limited their performance and it’s primarily this that is the performance difference between the 1st gen FX-8150 and the 2nd gen FX-8350 for instance (3.6GHz vs 4.0GHz) with generation to generation improvement less than 5%.

If the K10 rollout (original Phenom) debacle taught us anything is AMD aims high with a brand new CPU architecture and falls short during their first attempt.

Sadly the Bulldozer architecture doesn’t hold up to consumer usage patterns and applications as it was designed to go up against a Core i7 when fully engaged with 8 threads. Fine for a server world, not so fine for the rest of us.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OMG-If-you-only-knew-this-tips-for-new-players/first

Enjoy

You mean 64-bit OS and yes the game runs fine even though it’s a 32-bit program.