Guild Wars 2

The 7870xt will max out GW2 at 80+FPS (supersample on), asuming u have a monitor up to 1080p ofc, and ur CPU can keep up

SolarNova.1052:

No.

The 650ti , specialy a OC’d version, will be as fast as a stock 560ti. But a OC’d vs OC’d the 560ti will be better performance wise.

This is false, the 650ti is as fast as the 560ti only in a scenario with no filters aka no AA no AF and low resolution rendering, when memory comes to play the 560ti ( even the 560 non ti will beat it by a good 20/30%) will smoke any 650ti no matter how OCed it is due the low end memory interface, don’t spread false knowleadge. 650ti GPU itself is good but it is a low end card, it is not made for high resolutions or good ammount of filters the 560ti does.

Ur GPU is OK, the Gtx460 is one of the best cards ever created, even being Old it will run the game flawlesslly at 1080p or lower resolutions, upgrading the card won’t give u any performance imporvment so i don’t recomend upgrading ur card at least untill 700 series are out. The CPU is your main problem, u have a h61 chipset so overclocking is not gonna happen on that motherboard, the 3570 is indeed your best current choice.
The 1150 is a dead sockect meaning it won’t recive further upgrade support, the 1150 socket will be out in june, if u want to buy a new motherboard i recomend u to wait for the 1150 mobos and get the new i5 4570k or whatever is called. Your i3 will hold a couple of months still, just save the money so u can buy a decent mobo 150$ is a decent spot when u aim for max performance per dollar on intell mobos, is where u should be aiming.

Lower shadows and reflections (disable this completelly), Overclock ur CPU to 4.3-4.5GHz u will need a decent CPU cooler, a Coolermaster 212 EVO will do great here 30$.
That is pretty much everything u can do on your side, besides waiting for Arenanet to patch this problem.

First of all 32 bits=low performance, so for start upgrade to 64 bits asap, then the 560ti consumes a lot more power than a 650ti does, u would need arround a 650w certified PSU to run the 560ti with a decent headroom. The 550ti can rukitten50w easy, so if power is a consideration u have that right there. The 560ti will smoke the 650ti but at high heat and power cost. The latest generation of cards is allways the best choice to me, more efficient cards, they offer better drivers support and ofc better GPU tech overall.
So to me stick with the 650ti, buy a cheap 30$, coolermaster 550w power supply, and upgrade to win 8/7 64 bits (this will give u a decent boost in games, and overall system happiness).

Check for the videocard, most likelly u installed it in the wrong PCI lane, common mistake

Deactivate reflections, reduce shadow quality, this will help u big time, other than that, u probably need to buy a faster CPU or wait untill Arenanet fix the client resource management.

Ooj.1246:

same here.. i play with 7870 MSI oc edition and 3570k…

oh… 25/30 players my gpu works at 50/60%, in inc 60+ players in total, gpu drop at 20% -.-

Ur processor cannot keep up, that is why ur GPU idles arround 20% when more ppl is arround. Try overclocking it the highest u can, other than that there isn’t anything u can do, ur CPU is the very best u can buy to play this game, and even so, the game runs bad due client poor optimization. Just wait for a fix from arenanet, there is nothing AMD, or Nvidia can do fix this problem, since the problem is the game itself, not hardware related.

I guarantee that CPU won’t run this game, it was designed for media/internet computers, it won’t run any modern game, may be older titles but definitelly not GW2 or any other modern MMO, game may run but don¡t expect higher than 10-15 FPS (same for integrated graphics). Sorry bro Ur friend could build a whole new system for arround 500$ capable of playing GW2 or any other modern games tho, if u need some advice about what o buy just let me know.

It is a pretty solid setup for the money, u will be able to OC that CPU right out the box to 4ghz without tweaking any voltage settings, due the unlocked multiplier, it will make a huge difference in MMO games.
That CPU offers best bang for the buck u will get right now, the GPU is also very very solid for single monitor configurations up to 1080p, u will be a happy gamer, games like crysis 3 would run amazing on that thing for less than £500 it is about the best u can get, u could consider a 600W power supply tho, it should be arround £20 extra, and a good coolermaster 212EVO CPU cooler for £30 it will make the CPU run very cool and quiet i highlly recomend those 2, they will give u great benefit at low cost.

U need a laptop like this to run GW2 properlly
http://www.avadirect.com/gaming-laptop-configurator.asp?PRID=26190
Use the i7 3820 (good enough for gaming since u won’t take advantage of six cores or won’t be overclocking a lot inside that laptop) and the dual gtx 680m they will run any game flawlesslly.

A minimal benefit, i personally don’t know anyone who did this and see real noticeable improvment, most of it is placebo, so like i said most likelly u won’t see any benefit, but who knows, may be u are one of the lucky 5-10% ppl who actually see imporvemets by doing this. Most ppl who see benefits from this kind of tweaks, game boosters and stuff like that are ppl running systems full of bloatware, kittened up registry, ppl who don’t know how to keep their systems running nice, clean, fast, at full potential over time.

PvP and Pve will run fine in both at high settings, no laptop will handle ultra properly tho, WvW will be playable but not enjoyable low or high won`t make any difference here, it will just run bad due CPU bottlenecking the cards.
Unless u need the mobility, a laptop is not recomended for modern MMOs, they will struggle due CPU lack of horsepower in games like TERA, planetside 2, GW2, Rift, whenever massive battles happen.
Sager used to make laptops with desktop CPUs inside, i think that would be the best bet in case u really need the “mobility”, Sager is probably the only brand u should consider seriouslly when it comes to true “desktop replacement” gaming laptops, it won’t come cheap tho, u looking at 3000$/5000$ price tag.

Solfan.7531:

Guys, I got a i5 3570k OCed to 4,kitten, shall I do that to improve the FPS or let it as it now?

If so, how do I turn it back, just setting the ValueMax to 64?
What’s the ValueMin should be? 0 or something else?

Ur CPU will most likelly get no imporvments by disabling parking, most CPUs get no noticeable performnce boost by doing this.

CPUs will still be faster per core no matter what, 5-15% faster per clock every year, u can probably expect AMD CPUs to be a bit more efficient per core while intel goes for higher count of cores. 8 cores will probably be the standard in 2-3 years. But no matter what CPUs will still be faster per core with every generation, just don’t expect huge leaps in this matter (at least on intel side).

Downsample won’t give u any performance increase, it is just placebo effect, it has nothing to do with the CPU>GPU ratio, downsample will just increase ur GPU usage due redering the game at higher ressoltions, only recomended to play arround this feature if u own a 660ti/hd7950 with 3gb or ram or more, otherwise it could hurt ur performance pretty bad in most demanding games, it won’t give u a single extra frame in WvW scenarios i guarantee that.
Your Ivy chip won’t go a lot higher than 4.3 without adding voltage and tons of heat, i wouldn’t recomend to OC further (u don’t need it for any game) and it won’t give u any noticeable performance boost, u will just hurt ur CPU in order to get 1-3 FPS in return, not worth it, on my Sandy i can’t tell the difference between 4.0ghz and 5.0, i played WvW every single day since september i know what im saying when i talk about WvW performance i tryed many things and the game just will refuse to perform properlly. U must consider every MMO game suffer from this, it is normal, u must just wait until CPU tech evolve and upgrade; upgrading your system on 2/3year basis will give u noticeable performance boost on most MMOs due better RAM, CPU, GPU avaliable.

It is totally allowed don’t worry about it, either way they just can’t know if u are using them or not, don’t worry about it those devices were made for game like this anyway.

P.D: There are GW2 licensed keyboard and mouses with macro functions.

U will get a marginal performance gain over 4.0ghz the game just runs this bad, OCing higher will just potentially reduce ur CPU lifespan for a minor 1-3FPS gain which is not worth it. Even at 6ghz u would still get below 30 FPS during some battles specially inside SM castle (which is the worst spot performance wise)

It is a known bug, u have to reroll to 13.1 or older or just play without recording until AMD fix that, could take months tho, never trust AMD to fix something ASAP.

Is what i am saying anything running Unreal runs terrible unless u have a Nvidia card. Tera actually performs 10+ FPS faster on my 550ti than on my hd 7950… i presume due some cuda or physx implementation killing the CPU while runnig the AMD card. I love Nvidia hardaware and drivers are amazing, i just hate their dirty marketing strategies. Unreal Games shouldn’t be supported by gaming comunity in my opinion same for anything else running physx.

AION is a 2009 game, minimun requirements stands for a 2.8 single core CPU, recomended is a 2.0 dualcore CPU, how do u think those zergs played back in the day when most ppl still had Core2Duo CPUs? Just can’t compare em, sure now it plays much better, and GW2 will play way better in 3 years aswell on future hardware that is my point.
All this online games plays perfect on recomended hardware when it comes to Solo or small groups, but when u add a lot of ppl on the same area is when problems start happening has been like that since forever.
How well do u think those zergs played back in the day when ppl had slow dual/quad core CPUs?? How well do u think it played on 4 year old pentium 4s?. I guarantee GW2 plays much better on 4yo core2quads and phenomsII than AOIN played on 3.0 pentium4s (2005 also 4year old when AOIN came out). I am not saying it is the best optimized game, just saying it is ok, perfectly normal considerng how bad MMOs performs at launch.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

a HUGE selling point they really pushed was huge WvWvW battles, and massive scale DE’s, both of these are unplayable on the majority of systems, even people I know with far better systems then mine have issues where the game will bog down to 15-20fps, 20 is playable below that, not so much(at least not if your an active type player whos not constantly tab targeting.)

This happen on any game happened to WoW at the beggining, Raids, battlegrouds unplayable for most ppl, happened in Tera, nexus, battlegrounds unplayable for most ppl, planetside2 big battles unplayable for most ppl even when u rarelly see 40+ppl on ur screen. Every game which includes 40+ players interaction in a closed space will kill the CPU, cuz those are not AI models, it is not about rendering, skills particles efects, none of that, is the CPU trying track and predict what everybody is going to do, few miliseconds before they actually do it, in order to render the game in real time basically, since we are not playing on LAN.
Aditionally most of the models, lighting, shadows, physics are rendered by the CPU, not only in GW2 but in basically any other game, this means the complex the models, the complex the calculations on physics, lighting and shadows will be. The game engine does not help, it is unefficient but it is also the gw1 engine, this guys own it they can basically do whatever they want with it in order to improve it (they could not do this with a 3rd party engine). U also have to think back in 2008 when gw2 start development there was no dx11 engines arround.
En Masse is a publisher, they cannot do anything to the game, they can’t touch anything so even when u report bugs they just have to wait until koreans fix it, translate the game, then publish it in NA, aka a 6 month window starting from the moment they actually fix the bug in korea. So lets see in beta ppl reported UI eating half of the framerate for some system configurations, year and half later, they have done 0 to improve this, that is a gamebreaking problem, this is a problem a simple person can fix in no more than a month, 2 years later the haven’t done anything to fix it (yeah lazy devs spotted). The UI in tera is created as an overlay using Scaleform instead using the UnrealEngine for it, beacause of this, for some reasson it eats half of players FPS in any situation, for me particualry is 30 to 100 FPS difference, also Tera even while being single core optimized, it does not push the main core of my CPU beyond 60%-70% load, talking about optimization???
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0biPdDlpmQ
So yeah if u want to believe Tera devs are great and Arenanet are bad it is up to u, watch that video first tho. Sure u can not play the WvW feature properlly with 90% of PC configs, but u can at least play the game during PVE, dugeons, 8 v 8 PVP. Sure Gw2 has issues but compared to a beta quality game like Tera, GW2 is at least 3y ahead on development. So please don’t talk about that particular game being better than GW2 on any field…

Tera looks worst than GW2 from a tech point of view (not game art work or subjective stuff). Textures are terrible, scenarios lack of complexity, models are a lot more simple, just take a look at any city in GW2 compare it with any city in tera u will notice all this, everywhere in GW2 has so many hours in 3D modeling behind it is just amazing, no other MMO can compare to GW2 on that, 3D modeling and details are over the world are just impressive (cosidering how big it is) GW2 is a 80k$ Mercedes Benz while Tera is a cheap Ford, u cannot compare em. Only real resson to play Tera over GW2 is PVP, other than that GW2 beats Tera in every aspect, performance, support, game desing, game artwork, graphics, gameplay, sound, lore, i don’t really think Tera or any other Modern MMO can touch GW2 on any of those aspects.

P.D i don’t play GW2 anymore (untill they add decent PVP content), i play Tera atm, i know what i’m saying, playing Tera after playing GW2 for months feels like playing call of duty after trying far cry 3, feels SOOOOO CHEAP.

U should be getting 40+ FPS while questing on that i5. Some ppl just don’t know how to keep their system performing at it’s maximum potential while getting old.
1. So first off open ur case and uninstall everything from ur mobo, clean dust everywhere, reapply thermal compound on the CPU and GPU, make sure u put everything back properlly, ram sticks properlly set up to take advantage of dual channel memory tech.
2. OC ur CPU to 3.4ghz/3.8ghz, should be pretty easy (there are plenity of guides about how to do it on the web), probably will require a decent cooling solution, get a CM 212 EVO 30$ and it will make ur CPU run stupidlly cool.
3. Perform a fresh install of ur OS, drivers programs everything

This should take ur PC to it’s maximum posible performance, it is a standard manteniance u should perform once per year, there are a lot of guides arround in youtube and forums about how to do this if u have any doubt. As for an upgrade u are looking at 500$/700$ upgrade for mobo+CPU+Ram, but honestlly it won’t run better enough to justify the money. Better wait for the new CPUs in june to get some decent upgrade with DDR4 memory, hopefully.

GW2 does run much better than tera does…. WAY better only massive event TERA does have is the nexus raid and is a 5fps slideshow when the fight starts :P PPL who complains about this game and plays TERA are just talking kitten. I can mantain 100FPS+ during PVE in GW2 90% of the time, in tera i get arround -70 most of the time, with really nasty drops inside 5m dungeons and stuff like that (10FPS).
The fact is GW2 is much better optimized and have much better graphics than tera or any other modern MMO atm. As an Architech who does 3D rendering on daily basis, i can tell u GW2 scnerarios model complexity has no comparison in the modern MMORPG market, GW2 graphics complexity is by far ahead of anything else. It is also the only modern MMO featuring massive PVP battles. Sure it runs like crap during massive events but no other MMO does better, it won’t be any better until games start taking advantage of multicore CPUs. They just need to develop really focused MMO graphics engines for this kind of games but who would be willing to spend that kind of money on a MMO in 2012? When they know 90% of their customers run crappy PCs and don’t really care about getting 10FPS or 60FPS, just face it MMOs will allways run like crap untill hardware catches up, sad but true.
Fact is the game is no monthly fee and offers a lot of content for 60$, it is by far the best game of 2012 if u consider how much manpower Anet spended on making this game, game is amazing, fun, looks beautifull wherever u go, tons and tons of content. sure it runs bad but that is a common problem for MMOs, u need top of the line hardware (CPU) to play this kind of games, it has been like that since early 2000s.

At low settings only

My advice would be for now, get a i53570k with a z77 mobo, a decent air cooling system, and 8gb 2133mhz memory, keep ur 9800gt for now, then upgrade to a high en card. Honestly GW does not require a dencet graphics card so getting a powerfull mobo, CPU and memory combo is far more important, then u can get a decent card (550ti and 650ti are not really for gaming they will struggle on any real PC game).
If u don’t plan to ever overclock i5 3570k makes no sense since that is a overclocking made processor, get a 3550 or 3570 non K version and u will save 30$ u will get exact same performance.

Stormcrow.7513:

With Crysis 3, Tomb Raider and the Skyrim DLC I will most likely be putting this game away for a while until they can sort things out. I am certain that many others will do the same.

This, i am playing Tera activelly now since it went FTP hehehe so much PVP ownage, it runs even worst than GW2 and look a lot worst but it is still kitten fun to play, also Unreal engine 3 runs a lot smoother at 20-30 FPS than GW2 for some reasson, may be Anet devs should take a look at it becuse a PVP battle in tera at 20 FPS feels a lot smoother and playable than LA with FPS jumping from 30 to 100 when moving and turning the camera arround.

The Fx6300 is the best bang for the buck CPU atm, save some extra cash for the PSU u don’t need to go high end honestly 500/550W will do those are as cheap as 30$, certified power supply. I woul’d strongly recomend to go FX instead trinity tbh, the performance difference is totally worth it.

Download MSI afterburner use the OSD addon to lock ur FPS. Very simple

Upgrading the video card won’t help u in WvW sure u will get nice visuals in PVE but in WvW u will still get 10 FPS during battles. A 650ti or a 660 will max out the game easy, no shadows or reflections since those are calculated by the CPU, it is the best performance u can get out of ur old i7 in this game. Game uses only 1 core basically so ur CPU being poor in single thread performance will bottleneck no matter what video card u get. Even if u buy a 1000$ GTX titan u will get 10 FPS drops in WvW, so i recomend a videocard on the 150/200$ range.

Go my documents, guild wars 2 folder delete “local.dat”, ur CPU might be having heating problems chech the temps using HWinfo64

Any card about 150$ will max out the game, if u still get bad performance it’s on ur CPU, GW2 isn’t really graphics heavy. It is very CPU intensive tho. The low FPS during WvW means a CPU bottleneck, a new card won’t fix that sorry.

It will run, don’t expect high FPS from laptops under 1500$ tbh even high end 3000$ won’t have nice FPS on this game, laptop slow CPUs can’t really keep up with the game sorry.
Graphics options dosn’t really help getting better performance in GW2 it is all on the CPU not the GPU

Roll back to 13.1 drivers beta drivers cannot record GW2 atm, the game will just lock up

Download and instal GPUz, run it while running the game in windowed mode and check the graphs there, u will see GPU load.

410m is as slow as the integrated GPU inside intel CPU… pretty bad card indeed man :S

The exe should be in the same folder as the GW2.dat. In program files

Try deleting the Local.dat, located inside the guild wars 2 folder in my documents, also make sure the game is using the 5650m instead the intel garbage integrated GPU.

It will “work” but definitely not the best arround, if u are buying one of those AMD APUs u should get the A10 or A8 at least price difference is like 80$, but u will be getting 4 CPU cores instead 2. For under 700$ is the very best u can get for general low/mid range gaming. For GW2 is not very good tho, game is really CPU and GPU heavy for a laptop, a propper laptop to run GW2 decentlly should be arround 1200-1500$ at least. If u are not willing to spend that kind of money on a laptop just go straight for the AMD A10 APU series (buy yourself a good 1866/2133mhz memory kit it will boost performance a lot) or build a desktop.
http://www.amazon.com/HP-dv6-7245us-15-6-Inch-A10-4600M-Processor/dp/B00A94444K/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1362162709&sr=1-3&keywords=a10
Something like that is the cheapest u can go to run GW2

Core parking is designed for laptops to provide longer battery life it has 0 negvative impacts on the CPU lifespan, windows is just a terrible OS and cannot self adjust to achieve maximum performance by itself, u have to tweak some stuff to make it run better, ur CPU will just consube a little bit more power that’s pretty much it. Unpaking i7s and i3s cores is a good idea, and improves performance in many benchamarks, it is not as effective on i5s tho, seems like windows after 8 years still cannot manage hyperThreading properlly.
U can also download “processLasso” it is an advanced task manager that does what windows should do by default, it can be confiigured to run games using real cores only instead HyperThreaded cores, that could give u a little performance boost aswell.

omino.4302:

Why was the word ‘Lousy’ removed from my thread title? deleting the word lousy won’t fix the lousy fps

Originally was “Will the lousy fps be fixed”? now someones renamed it “will the fps be fixed”

LOL, i guess they could just make a propper statement about the issue, instead going editing the thread titles don’t u think?

Indeed, try unpark ur cores (google core parking utility). besides that there isn’t much u can do, try overclocking ur processor. Game is really heavy in WvW, the engine is just not optimized to render properly multiple models without taking a huge performance hit.
U can also disable shadows and reflections those are CPU heavy options it will grant u a huge FPS boost since it will take some considerable ammount of load out of ur CPU.
Other than that is on arenanet side to optimize the game.

No dude u are kind of wrong about Dx11, lets see, it can boost CPU performance by doing 2 things, basically multhithreading is much better on DX11 protocols which means it could potentially be more efficient rendering the game by using 4 core CPUs, not going into details here, just watch some new dx11 engines and how they perform on games like BF3 and Crysis 3, don’t tell me BF3 is not a CPU instensive game cuz it is a FPS, that is not true, it is actually way more CPU intensive than any MMO out there due the complex models, advanced lighting and physics, full destructive enviroments (do u have any idea how CPU intensive that is and why no other games does something like that????), a multiplayer 64 players map in BF3 is about twice CPU intensive than any WvW scenario the diference is the engine optimization for dx11. Also by adding new features as tasselation u can create more complex models with tons of poligons and make em easier and faster to render by the GPU, but ofc this kind of stuff would requiere a full revamp of 3D models which is not gonna happen.

Sure a cosmetic implementation adding AA filters won’t do anything but making the game runs slower, but i don’t think that is what ppl means when talking about dx11 support.

BTW if u go AMD get 2133 memory AMD performance scales very well with memory speed and latencies beacuse of the memory controller, it performs poorly in some games using slow memory F1, GW2 are pretty good examples of this. Also get a good mobo since u will probaly be using it for the next gen chips aswell get a 990fx Asus sabertooth, great overclocker, good performance, very good comoponets quality and manufacture, ddon’t cheap out on the mobo.

It all comes down to where u measure ur FPS, look at this video, u will see a comparison between ur processor and AMD CPU, try compare ur pc in lion’s arch to this. U will see the FPS spiking like crazy it is normal, whoever says this dosn’t happen is delusional. Sure if u get lower performance than this there is a problem with ur hardware, probably a power setting or something like that it can hit GW2 performance pretty bad. just go Lion’s arch get the same setting this guys has and make a similar run to compare, then come back here with a feedback, i’m here to help.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuCL1gv4vR0
No black magic, just the truth man

ZaxanRazor.6235:

Rampage.7145:

Yup, u have to overclock to get more FPS, the stock i7 will bottleneck since game uses 1 core only the others just feed from the main thread.

What absolute nonsense. Don’t listen to this.

An i7 won’t bottleneck anything. I have one, I can easily get 60FPS in Divinity’s Reach.

OP, do you have reflections and / or supersampling on?

Sure, now go to WvW, or a dragon event and tell me the i7 isn’t bottlenecking u, i know cuz i have a 2600k and yeah it can easy bottleneck my hd7950 it even bottleneck my gtx 550ti which i use as a phsyx card, but sure don’t listen to me i don’t know kitten about computers
Again it dosn’t happen cuz i7s are bad processors, it happens due the game main thread capping out on 1 core. Game can’t take advantage of multicore CPUs, and that was cool back in 2005 but in 2012 that is terrible due most ppl CPUs are quads at least, having games still coded for pentium 4 architecture will make em run like crap on modern systems.

Aza.2105:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Rampage: wow, your system must suck or something, playing L2 i never see lower then my cap of 60fps…….even in huge mobs of players with all sorts of effects going off…..

L2 at a constant 60fps? The biggest pile of bs I’ve ever heard. The game has been running the exact same since 2004, its so poorly coded that it doesn’t take advantage of modern cpus. The game runs just as it did when I had my Athlon 2500+. Rampage probably doesn’t have a bad system. You are good at telling tall tales.

Again i have high end stuff only i7 2600k@4.5, radeon hd7950, i also have an AMD system running phIIx6@4ghz radeon hd6950, L2 gets as low as 5FPS during sieges on both systems alike, i have no reasson to lie here, i played the game since betas and i can tell u it runs just as bad as it did on my pentium 4 back then. Unreal engine is terrible for an MMO it is desinged for FPS games the way it loads the assets onto memory is terrible it dosn¡t cache enoug info to keep up rendering large ammounts of ppl so it takes a huge hit when having 20 ppl on the screen fighting each other and totally unplayable with 100+
In fact GW2 engine is a lot better than Unreal 3.5 engine when it comes to huge PvP battles hands down, GW2 runs bad but not nearly as bad as Tera does when it comes to PvP or raids, even 5 man dungeons run like crap on Tera sub 15 FPS, that is a straight fact, i play Tera more than GW2 honestly, i know what i’m saying.

That is normal ir CPU will struggle in GW2 due it is a single thread application, u can halp it by reducing the shadows and reflections it will be an instant 20+ FPS. Those are very CPU dependant options, other than that, reducing any other graphical options won’t give u any performance boost. My recomendations is turn shadows and reflection down to a point u feel comfortable with, and just max out everything else.
Bang for the buck

Well yeah the engine just suck, it is not ur CPU fault at all, don’t worry about it, better coded MMOs will come at some point soon now new consoles are arround the corner games will become more multi CPU dependant which is awesome for the 2011 platform due the quad channel memory and the ability to upgrade to a 8 core Ivy-e U did a wise choice going for the 2011 socket instead the 1155 which is allready a dead socket.