Guild Wars 2

The Q6600 is highly unlikely to be able to handle WvWvW with the amount of processing it has to endure with the numbers of people present…not only is the speed of the procesor in terms of ghz low, it is also old architecture which is also not helping.

Your game will run fine as you have said, when its not got much CPu bound stuff to process,.. but pvp gives heavy load to the cpu (and gpu but only if your cpu can handle it first)

In all honesty its about time people still using Core 2 Duo’s or Core 2 Extremes need to update to a i5 or better. it aint really THAT expensive for the performance increase you will get.

My experiance.

GPU = Gigabyte 560ti SOC edition
CPU = Intel i7 3930k 4.6ghz

Timberline Falls – North of Malorean Wilds checkpoint – Swamp area

Drivers 306.02 beta / Before = 33 FPS 1920×1080, Max settings,native sampling
Drivers 306.63 beta / After = 37 FPS 1920×1080, max settings, native sampling

Slight improvment, though i will point out that chances are im at the limits of my gpu anyway, the area in question has heavy mist effects lots of reflections(water in swamp), npc’s ,trees, buildings etc.
I didnt really need to put the dirvers in since i was happy with my performance. Usualy being between 45-60 fps depending on the area. Very few areas droped me as low as the area stated above. Infact i think that was the worst. (excluding WvWvW)

But its an improvment none the less, so thanks.

Simple answere is NO.

One: its an AMD ..and they ‘generaly’ dont run mmo’s like GW2 well .. GW2 specificaly.

Secondly: the gpu is slightly less powerfull than a 450 nvidia ..and that wont run GW on high at high resolutions with good fps.

let me put it this way .. a OC’d 560ti wont run GW on max at 1080p in WvWvW without droping below 30 fps so a 6670 has no chance.

in all honesty if you want the performance your after you want to be able to spend $500 on the CPU, RAM, Motherboard,powersupply. Then aditional funds on a good gpu ,560ti and above is my recommendation, and everythign else ..i.e ..case, cd roms mouse keyboard etc etc. Probably looking at for ‘eveything’ accesseries and all ..about $1000 at a guess. If you already have accessories and are just after the internal components then you could proably get it all for around $700.

its harsh but keeping up to date with computers and having ‘good’ performance in new games is an expensive task.

BTW im from England so my estimates may be of slightly.

I said go cpu for physX becouse from my experiance with a 560ti, physX runs better with cpu.

This may not be the case for 600 series, in which case yea ok run from gpu.

In all honesty ..

laptop =/= good performance gaming.

Even with an i7 cpu, its still a ‘slow’ i7 cpu when it comes to mmo’s.

Now it could just be your laptop isnt good enough.. but its also highly likely your just having compatability issues with GW2 ..which is causing many people with diferent rigs some greif currently.

Anet is working to patch GW2 to sort out some performance issues, you may get lucky and find it fixed after a patch.

Get what you pay for i guess.
The ONLY reason you buy an AMD nowerdays is if you cant afford an Intel. Or some other money reason.

Thats not meant as an insult to those who have an AMD btw :P ..just saying.

Probably bought it from a family member :P

But seriosly. We may not have given you the specific answere you wanted. But when you openly put out details liek the price and such. You should expect people to comment on it.. specialy when its as overpriced as it is here.

We mean no disrespect…well some might ..but this is the interwebs :P

in any case. We have told you ..so ..moving on

It’s like buying an American car Over a German or Japanese car; They are cheaper , they can look awsome ..be super fast in straight lines …but my god can the interiors be kitten and the handling laughable :P and they depreciate faster than you can blink. :P

maybe a bit generalized but meh lol

Even though GW2 is having issues with people 600 series cards i would recommend team green (Nvidia). There cards although more expensive are overall better.

As for that physX thing. Have your physx set to cpu, you get better performance than trying it run it of you gpu. Specialy if you have a OC i5 or i7.
I personaly would choose a Sandybridge – E over an Ivybridge ..since they overclokc better, their top end speeds are insane….but they do cost more.

@Soulwatcher.2604
you cant compare a MMORPG to a MOFPS.

Battlefield 3 may be a brute when it comes to graphics but in terms of cpu. Its nothing compared to proper mmo’s. For one thing the maps are notibly smaller in BF3, the number of possible textures for each player is also smaller compared to the custom armor combinations and number of them for GW2 and other mmo’s. Not to the mention the shear number of people in mmo’s.

Seriosly ..when comparing ..keep to the same genre. MMO to MMO. MoFPS to MoFPS, RTS to RTS, Racing to Racing .e.tc etc.

The gpu is, ‘enough’ but if you want to run at 1080p res and high settings. even that gpu wont be able to handle GW2 in heavy situations like WvWvW and heavy pve battles.
I know this becouse my 560ti maxes out often droping below 60fps down to the 30’s in heavy pve, 40-50 in lions arch.

Im in the Uk so not 100% sure on prices in America ..but $500 doesnt sound like much tbh.

If your ok with lower settings with that gpu then you should be able to get a i5 build. 2500k cpu + cooler, 8gb ram, and a mobo for that much. if you want a new gpu then you might not be able ot afford that ontop. If you can howeveri recommend a 500 series 560ti minimum. The 600 seires is having issues atm and the 700 series is coming out next year so you could just wait for that.

thats the 600 series gpu causing issues ..not the cpu

Do remember that the GW2 engine does have its limits. In WvWvW that engine is being put under huge load and thus no matter how fast your cpu is, it doesnt matter if the engine is bottlenecked.
That said you can push through the engines inefficencies with a proper beast cpu (4.5ghz – 5ghz) BUT that will also requir top end 600 series SLI GPU’s aswell to keep up. Also those cpu ranges also limit you to SB-E since ‘most’ IV cant overclock that high before they reach their thermal barrier, where anything less than DICE/LN2 cooling wont help.

AMD cpu’s have bad performance with GW2 …and in general ..even with a high clock. checkout Tomshardware GW2 performance review. The AMD’s have ALOT lower fps.

You will have to give a budget figure. ‘decent’ is different for each person.

Per gigabyte cost is still higher on SSD’s .BUT if you already have enough ‘space’ and are looking for a drive for perfomance. I.e OS & games. Then the SSD’s easily beat the worth of a fast HDD.

A fast small sized HDD vs a fast small sized SSD. The HDD will be cheaper but the SSD is more worth it since the size issues goes out the window, a 128gb drive is enough for OS + a couple games.. so your just paying for performance. The only time size becomes an issue is if your looking for storage .in which case performance is void , no need for a SSD there.

@Gareni: Another option is to get 2 smaller drives (2x 7200 or 10k rpm) and format them to Raid0. You get the combined size of the drives BUT they act as one and increase each others performance.
The way it works is, both drives are bassicaly cut into many many strips. Then interlaced. Data is split evenly onto each strip. So a single peace of data is split into 2(or more) over the 2 drives. Meaning when reading that 1 peace of data the computer can read from both drives at the same time completing the read in a faster time than trying to read all of said data from 1 drive.

Single drive
|————————| 20 seconds read time.

Raid0
|———-| 14 seconds read time.
|———-|

EDIT: for the sake of comparison:
SSD
|————————| 4 seconds read time

The resolution is low so that the graphics card is in no way caping the top FPS, that specific benchmark was testing cpu performance.

you really need to understand things befor posting >.<

As for AMD, well to be honest the difference between AMD and Intel is so vast atm that even if you have a mid range AMD OC’d to 4gz, a Mid range Intel Non OC wil lout perform it, and a low end intel OC woudl laos out perform it ..specialy in GW2.

i dont beleve there will be a fix, atleats not one that will give a huge fps boost. The AMD chips obviosly are not capable of processing the data, that GW2 uses, efficently.

Correct SSD’s dont help fps, but they do help reduce and/or stop stuttering from slow access times. Liek loading player armor textures, loading map icons etc.

i’ve experianced this myself when i moved my GW2 game from my HDD to my SSD.

besides the question was
“out of curiousity, do ou guys think it is worthwhile to upgrade my HDD to a 7200rpm one for hte sake of faster boot time or upgrade the ram chip to a 8gb x2?”

ill be honest, you cant upgrade just one component on a omputer as old as yours.

Simply put, if you upgrade your grpahics card, your cpu will slow it down, if you upgrade your cpu, your grpahics card will slow it down. Both ways you will see enxt to no improvment.

To upgrade you will bassicaly need a new computer.

New cpu+ new cooler = new motherboard = new ram = new graphics card.

if your case is a BTX format you will need a new ATX case (90% of cases nowerdays are ATX) Check wikipedia if you dont know the difference between BTX and ATX.

You most likely will need a new powersuply (its usual a good idea to replace an old one anyway)

So unfortunatly, you will need to save up some money

I posted this to a reply to som1 else who said the game was to to hard.

“Think you need to understand that games of the past 12 or so years have been getting easier and easier. Play a game from the late 80’s to late 90’s and they are much harder >for what they are< compared to todays games.

The problem is that now we have a generation of gamers that have been brought up on said easy mode games and think those games are the ‘standard’ and that anything even remotly harder is ‘wrong’ and for the hardcore. When in actual fact the ‘hardcore’ parts of games or the few ‘hardcore’ games that currently exist, are the ‘real’ standard, and everything else is ‘easy’.

The next problem you come across is that no matter how many times people try to explain this like i am now, or how much proof is presented.. these people we are talking about NEVER accept that they are used to ‘easy mode’ games.

And lets face it MMORPG’s will never be ‘hard’ anyway, atleats with the current control style (tab targeting). When the average mmorpg becomes a proper action combat mmorpg, THEN, the real difficulty can start to be added. As it stand atm the ‘difficulty’ is just down to ‘tactics’ and ‘time’. You got enough time and know the tactics you can breeze through the game.”

Im not sure how much performance increase you will see from upgrading from somthing slower than 7200 rpm. That said i havnt used anything slower than 10k rpm in atleast 5 years and before that i was on 7200rpm.

The best way to see faster boot times and performance is to go from a standard HDD (any rpm) to a SSD (Solid state drive).

well i cant tell you where to get this item for free obviosly :p But if you can ‘aquire’ it ..get Aida 64 Extreme Edition.

It does everything, and its brilliant if you have a LCD display on your keyboard sincei t runs well with them.

For just GPu monitoring you could use maybe evga precission, i tend to use that for my custom gpu fan speeds and as an fps monitor.

The game wont take advantage of more cores than its designed to, BUT with more cores it means other applications like your OS can use said other cores leaving the cores GW2 uses free to deal with GW2.
A 2 core system with or without hyperthreading will struggle with GW2 as all processes will be utilizing said 2 cores. a 4core will deal much better ..specialy with hyperthreading.
And a 6 core better still.
The main thing though when you get to the current generation processor is that the core speed is atleast 3ghz at minimum for acceptable frame rates * quality. You will see a ingame speed difference up to possible 4.5ghz when it comes to mmo’s ..and higher still once you get into high end SLI’ing where the gpu can run just as fast as the cpu. (im talking quad sli + 5ghz cpu OC)

Indeed SSD’s run faster the more space they have free ..i personaly try keep my ssd below 75% usage. Which means i can usualy only have my OS + 2 mmo’s ..atm thats Tera Online and GW2

I beleve your CPu is your bottleneck.. but to check .. download some monitoring software and see what your cpu and gpu susage is in lions arch like in your picture.

Chances are ether your gpu is maxed out, which i doubt since that gpu is only slightly behind the geforce 560ti which i run. or your CPU is running at high usage 60%+

Another way to check is to increase your graphcis settings ingame, keeping increasing them till your fps drops from what it is now. I suspect you can increase those settings wihtout much fps loss untill you start reachign max settings. Sugesting again that your CPU is bottlenecking you.

Unfortunatly upgrading your cpu will requir pritty much a new computer ..new cpu &cooler = new mobo = new ram = possibly new powersupply.

SSD vs HDD will only show major improvments on boot up with ‘all’ computers.

Only with higher end computers will you see faster loads times in games, even then it will be a small inprovment in ‘most’ games.

I recently moved my GW2 game over to my SSD and the load times were, well tbh i couldnt see that much of a difference, though there was maybe 1 or 2 seconds difference.
My main improvment was loading times of the main map ..befor, i would get a very slight delay in icons appearing, now its instant.
Same goes for when the game is loading many players and npc textures at once like in lions arch. The SSD removed or reduced the slight stutter that used to occcure from the slower response times of a standard HDD ..even one that was 2×500gb 10k rpm drives in raid 0.

A SSD is one of the last things to replace for a performance increase when dealign with a desktop PC, since although it does improve performance it will only be by a small amount when dealign with games.

in all honesty you current bottleneck is highly likely to be your CPU.

You want to go for a x60 or above. Meaning a 560ti 570 580 590, or 660ti 670 680 690. or ATI equivilant. i recommend Nvidia though

Be prepard for possible issues with the 600 series cards though since GW2 seems to be having problems with performance with alot fo 600 series owners.

PCI -E 3 aint being fully utilized yet anyway so it doesnt matter, aslong as your mobo has the correct slots your fine. in the case of PCI-E 2 ..thats fine for current gpu’s.

A 560ti will run GW2 fine, they are also cheap, you can then save any extra money and uprgrade that card next year for a 700 series. OR you can buy a 660ti or 670 now, but be prepard for issues. GW2 and the 600 series cards are having problem with performance atm.

The gaming cards ‘really’ start at X60 ..so the 560ti, 570, 580, 590, 660ti, 670, 680, 690.

Its hard to tweek real ‘difficulty’ in a game with controls such as GW2 and many other mmo’s. Without full control of your characters movements you are left to the stats/gear/and rng to decide whether your fail or succeed even after utilizing what control you have in GW2’s case, skills that proc a block, or a heal, the limited dodging etc.

By that i mean, you cant time when you attack to get a better hit in, you cant aim for a more vulnerable spot, you cant dodge when you want (limited to 2 dodges atm), you cant parry or block when you want (limited again). To get real difficulty put into a game you need the game mechanics to allow it, and dispite GW2’s attempt to move away from the general mmorpg controls, its still very limited compared to action games with ‘twitch combat’.

You can get more for your money with a desktop. but for a gaming rig, imo, you should have over £1k to spend if you getting everything ..keyboard mouse and all. Anything less and you may be dissapointed with the results and/or have to upgrade relativly quikly down the line.

50 fps is not ‘high’ fps though 60/70/80+ is high.

poeple with 50fps on max settings and atleast 1080p resolution are using top of the range gpus and/or sli totaly overkill for GW2.

When i say the engine cant handle it.. i dont mean ..it gets to a point then stop producing better fps.. i mean ..it gets to a point where you need monster ..and i mean proper monster pc’s to compensate for the fact that the engine can no longer ‘efficiently’ handle the amount of load it is put under.

i dont mind being proven wrong .show me a post where some1 has proof that they are getting high fps with an average system in wvwvw during a full on siege at max settings and high resolution ..and ill concede the point

Anet is constantly trying to patch the games performance ..somtimes it brings up issues with peoples system that had none before. So you may have just got unlucky.

if you can, i advise moving your GW2 game to a SSD ,if you have one, to remove any possible stutter caused by slow access speeds with your HDD.

i would recommend a 560ti if you can stretch to it, it is the best bang for buck 500 series card.

Do remember that GW2’s engine is not able to handle the load it is put under with so many people in one place. Its the same with most mmo’s. The engine has its limits. Tera online for example runs very well until you have 40+ people on the screen. at which point it wont matter if you had a 3960X cpu at 5ghz and 4x 690 gpu’s ..you wil lstill get low framerates. Its the same for GW2.

There is nothing wrong with your system, its virtualy impossible to get high framerates in WvWvW.

Yes well like i said it comes down to personal prefrence and how safe you want to play it. High temperatures do reduce life span even intel has stated it.

BUT since each cpu is individualy different, you can never say diffintivly what temperature is ok. 2 cpus of the same type could burn out at different tempeartures.
I tried 2 3930k cpu’s the 1st didnt OC very well in terms of its stability ..but could get to 1.38v before my air cooling started to become inadiquet. My second 3930k can OC better with lower volts but my cooling can only handle it up to 1.37v.
Goes to show that thermal dynamics of the cpu’s were slightly different and thus each ones threshold was different.

I prefer to air on the side of caution when it comes to expensive components

Well to be honest no matter the cause you laptop is still not good enough for GW2

BUT what your experiancing could be due to a problem with your laptop ..if restarting it helped then maybe you could try formating your drive and reinstalling your operating system …. you may have a virus or corrupted system files that is causing you computer to slow down after extensive use.
That or it could be overheating.

Monitoring software would help detect overheating and tell us you gpu and cpu suage during gameplay.

Well those occasions,, was it working well for like 1 minute then went to pot ..or was it a whole play seession that was running fine .. then when you went back the next day it wasnt ?

Hmm well i wont go into specifics but you can put yourself a rig together for around £600 that would play GW2 with acceptable frame rates but if you have £1000 to spend then get yourself a
2500k cpu atleast
you can ether buy a cheap 560ti gpu and wait for the 700 series ot come out ..or bite the bullet and get a 670 and put up with the current issues the 600 series has with GW2.
The rest of the computer is built around that ..So a 650w or 750w powersupply, a mothebroard.. 16gb ram. maybe a 128gb SSD.. you’ll need a case ofcourse and any other periphirals you dont already have i.e cd rom ..keyboard etc.

my adivce to you when building a computer ..take your time.. i spent 2 months researching to get my rig sorted. granted it took that long becouse i was still saving ..but i would still give yourself a couple weeks to get the answeres you need and find the best deals.

Just to give you an idea ..the rig in my sig cost me around £1200 when i got it, for the CPU,Cooler,Case,RAM, MoBo, SSD, and Powersuply ..the rest of the parts i already had.

Im afraid i cant help you wiht laptops if you want one of those. i stear clear of them when it comes ot gaming.

Sorry to say that those types of programs are never really that accurat from my experiance.
you best bet is to prowl the web for people with specs simular to your own and see what they get in a game before buy said game.

You rig im afraid is old and low end. It will nto play GW2 very well. Not only is your CPua major bottleneck, but your GPU is also very old and wont be helping ether. hell £1000 current laptops have a hard time with GW2, so i really cant reccomend enough that you get yourself a Desktop PC

TJMax is just there to stop it insta dieing.

genral rull of thumb is ..once over 85C you are reducing the cpu;s life span.

Thats why most OC’s make sure they stop OC’ing once their cpu reaches a personal set temperature depending on how safe they want to play it.

For example my rig. I decided i would stop OC’ing once my air cooling could not keep the cpu bellow 75c or there abouts. Why? becouse once a really hot day comes along you can add 5c to that making it around 80c (at 100% load). Any hotter and i risk reducing its lifespan.

now desktop and laptop cpu’s have the same tjmax 90-100c depending on make and generation. That doesnt mean its ok to run them a few degress under that number :P

Think you need to understand that games of the past 12 or so years have been getting easier and easier. Play a game from the late 80’s to late 90’s and they are much harder >for what they are< compared to todays games.

The problem is that now we have a generation of gamers that have been brought up on said easy mode games and think those games are the ‘standard’ and that anything even remotly harder is ‘wrong’ and for the hardcore. When in actual fact the ‘hardcore’ parts of games or the few ‘hardcore’ games that currently exist, are the ‘real’ standard, and everything is is ‘easy’.

The next problem you come across is that no matter how many times people try to explain this like i am now, or how much proof to present.. these people we are talking about NEVER accept that they are used to ‘easy mode’ games.

And lets face it MMORPG’s will never be ‘hard’ anyway, atleats with the current control style (tab targeting). When the average mmorpg becomes a proper action combat mmorpg, THEN, the real difficulty can start to be added. As it stand atm the ‘difficulty’ is just down to ‘tactics’ and ‘time’. You got enough time and know the tactics you can breeze through the game.

Depending on the laptop and its heat disipation ..you could try OC’ing it a tad BUT do not do it if it already gets hot as standard. The main reason people dont OC laptops is becouse they suck at keeping cool. So if it already gets up to say 80c dont bother trying.

128gb minimum for SSD
I recommend the Corsair Performance Pro, i bought one about 2 months back i think it was and it had only just come out. it was tied 1st as the fastest SSD available (tied with a Plextor). it has incredible fast access times and balanced performance on both read and write ..unlike others that ether have fast write & slower read or visa versa.

As for is it worth it ..well it will deffiantly increase your boot times and loading times but as for ingame performance. You wont see a difference unless your running a fast desktop..even then it will just reduce or remove stutter caused by loading textures from your drive.

640 is a lower end 600 series card. If i were you i would get ether a 660 or a 560/570/580.

When it comes ot choosing a peace of hardware it helps to know you current system specs. You dont want to get into a situation were you upgrade your graphics card and find you get no performance gain becouse you cpu is your bottleneck.

Its down to the design i beleve. its not as complexe as an action game where thigns like that can happen. it has to be limited in complexity otherwise the requirments to play the game would be immense.. not to mention the increased likelyhood of bugs..which are already running rampant.

It helps. I beleve that you cpu is your bottleneck.

it does not have to reach 99% usage on the cpu to bottleneck unlike a GPU.

Normaly i would advise a small OC, but since its a laptop i wouldnt recommend that.

It isnt your ram ether 6gb is enough.

have you made sure your laptop power management is set to performance etc ..also check nvidia control panel make sure its set GW2 using the correct settings.

Erm your frame limiter is set to 30 ..thats why your maxing out at 30 for one thing.

Also run some monitoring software and tell use your cpu and gpu usage when running GW2.

Since its smoke that causing your slow downs its probably becouse your graphics card doesnt have enough grunt to handle it. I.e not enough shaders etc.

Yea i know i shouldnt listen to rumors ..and in truth that isnt the main reason.

my main reason is simply that my last upgrade was from 2x 88o0 GTX’s to a single 560ti .. a Big jump. Going from a 560ti to a 670 ..wouldnt give me a big enough imporvment .atleats noo to me. So im waiting on the 700 series.

Yea the 600 series cards are not likeing GW2 atm. But i have not heared of anythign as extreme as what your saying. Run some stress tests on your gpu make sure it isnt borked.

On another note… why in the name of …anything ..would you spend £1k on an alienware ..they are soooo overpriced >.< owell no matter.

When you go multiscreen or above 1080p you will generaly need ether SLI or a high end 600 series. A 580 is good ..but im pritty sure your at its limits.

Best way to tell is to monitor its usage when your at your said 30 fps ..if its at 99% ..ur maxed out and need more gpu power. If its not, then there is another problem.

Also ..you have a 3930k ..why are u not overclocking ..its a monster overclocker

Edit: Swordbreaker before you say anything about my gpu and my 3930k ..yes i know i should be running a newer card, preferably sli ..but im waiting on the 700 series..i have my reasons )