GFX Card for Guild Wars2

[Umoedd]

Hello all, I'm looking at replacing my Nvidia 8800 GTX and was hoping to get a recommendation on a card in the £100 - £150 price range.

At the moment I am considering the AMD 6800 cards.

My system is:
Quad Core Q6600 processor @ 2.40 GHz
8 GB RAM (max for my mobo)
Windows Vista 64 bit OS

Any advice or recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[Marine-RX179]

Actually your CPU would be a bottleneck...I had a Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz and it was still not fast enough and was hugely bottlenecking my 5850 (around 10% faster than the 6850 and around the same as the 6870) in the mmos that I played. And considering Guild War 2 only uses 2 cores (from what I read), it certainly won't help. My advice to you is overclocked you Q6600, and see if your 88000GTX's GPU usage is even stressed to 99% during intensive scene/frame rate drop (you can use MSI Afterburner for displaying graphic card details on usage etc on screen while in game). If the GPU usage is far from 99%, then upgrading the graphic won't do you much good. You probably should look into upgrading your CPU/platform in the future.

 

[mickyflinn]

What resolution are you gaming at ?

 

[BrianB]

8800GTX is dated now, it shouldn't handle GW2. 6850 should do a decent job I would save a bit more and get something in the £180 range, like a 560ti or 7850 for £185.

If you can't wait, a 6850 should be fine. You can get them for £50-70 second hand... I wouldn't buy one new since there is better cards only £30-40 away.

Resolution is important as well. 8800GTX only has 768mb video memory, newer games can use 1-2GB and upwards if you are going for higher res and high settings.

Definitely overlock your Q6600. It's easy to get 3.24GHz out of them. Mine is at 3.2 with vcore of 1.34v and so far it's powerful enough. Problem with MMOPRG is that they can get very CPU intensive.

 

[Umoedd]

Thanks for replies, I am gaming at 1920 x 1200.

Marine, thanks, I was concerned about bottlenecking and your advice seems very logical.
The card was going to be the last upgrade for this system, but I'll try the overclocking first.

 

[Umoedd]

Thanks BrianB, I did have it overclocked to 3.2 but changed OS and left it at 2.4 as I wasn't really gaming much.
Thanks for card advice too.

 

[Marine-RX179]

8800GTX is dated now, it shouldn't handle GW2. 6850 should do a decent job I would save a bit more and get something in the £180 range, like a 560ti or 7850 for £185.

If you can't wait, a 6850 should be fine. You can get them for £50-70 second hand... I wouldn't buy one new since there is better cards only £30-40 away.

Resolution is important as well. 8800GTX only has 768mb video memory, newer games can use 1-2GB and upwards if you are going for higher res and high settings.

Definitely overlock your Q6600. It's easy to get 3.24GHz out of them. Mine is at 3.2 with vcore of 1.34v and so far it's powerful enough. Problem with MMOPRG is that they can get very CPU intensive.

But for most mmos, the low frame rate caused by the lack of graphic grunt can be sorted by lowering the graphic settings a bit, whereas low frame rate caused by CPU bottleneck there's not much can be done about it at all. On the mmos that I play, scenes that which I used to dip to as low as low 20s are now at constant 55fps+ after upgrading from my Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz to the i5 2500K overclocked to 4.5GHz using the same 5850.

While I would agree with the point that his 8800GTX should be upgraded, but from my own experience with my 2nd PC which is a E5200 overclocked to 3.75GHz with a 9800GTX+ (slightly faster than the 8800GTX) on the mmo that I play (which also only use two cores)...even with 4xAA, I still got huge GPU usage drop and frame rate pitfall in areas with lots of people, so the CPU is still the bigger bottleneck.

I think the best route that the OP could go is probably upgrade his platform/CPU to IvyBridge i3 when it's out in September, and then saving up for graphic card upgrade after that.