Quad or Dual Core, ok with GW?

Check to make sure both your CPU and GPU are clean and not overheating.

Oh I see the E6850 now, it's just a Conroe.

For that price, you're better off with a E8400, imo.

It could be your video card, it sounds like my old GTX when I play Crysis (it overheats under very high load). Poor MSI... I blamed them for a very long time... then they released the godly P7N Diamond, I drooled over it for days... but by then I already have bought EVGA's 780i... it's made of fail.

No problems with a quad core processor here, mine is the intel Q6600.

GW plays the same as it always did only at a far higher fps than it did before.
Its running all my other older games without problem.

I've been running GW on a Q6600 & Vista Ultimate 64 since september '07, no problems.

I don't only play GW, so it's not "overkill" for me.


lol only in 4 yrs time? I do a complete system upgrade every 18 months or so

It only occurs in GW. When I play Crysis, HL2, any other game really, it's stable.

GPU has a max of 45C under load.
Checking the CPU in a sec, but I'm pretty sure that's not the problem.

Running an AMD dualcore right now and since several months: no problem at all with GW.
@Aera: Crysis etc will tax your graphics, but not necessarily your CPU, whereas GW does... It might be a good idea to run a "cpu torture test" (there's several on the net) because I too get the feeling you might be having overheating issues.


@OP: If you find that individual apps run too slow for your taste, then I'd go with a dualcore, because you can then get one with faster clockspeed for the same price, and most games will just run on one core, so the clockspeed will determine how fast the game runs.

If you find that you get annoyed not so much by the raw speed of individual apps or games, but more by the computer running at uneven speed due to load (e.g. a virus scan turning your game to a slideshow) then you'll probably appreciate the quadcore, even though for a fixed cost you'll get lower clockspeed than with the dual.

Basically more cores isn't really about running individual things faster, it's a but running more things without any speed penalty. I do that a lot, so I'm buying a Q9450.

There's no such thing as future-proofing in computers, that really isn't a factor. Whatever you buy it'll be old and weak in a years time, and hopelessly obsolete in two.

Whichever you buy the processor will be plenty fast enough for GW (and no doubt also GW2 when that's released).

They look fine to me.

Temperatures wouldn't go any further after 3 minutes of the torture test.

I've updated my motherboard drivers and BIOS. I'll see how it goes now.

what exactly is speedfan incorrectly reporting at -128° C?

There is a dual-core issue with Guild Wars. I've been in contact with suport, as have many others experiencing the lock-ups, and it has not been rectified yet. The only way to avoid the system locking up is to set the affinity to single core when running Guild Wars.

Yesterday I received a PM from Gaile Gray about this issue, so hopefully now that I've also explained the situation to her she may be able to light a fire under someone's desk and have them look into it in more detail.

It is not a system problem, this system is hand-built by me and suffers no problems at all in any applications, games or anything else that I decide to run, In fact it's only Guild Wars that ever crashes at all, and like I said above putting it onto a single core cures the problem. So, it's got to be something in the way Guild Wars handles multiple-cores that's causing it. Temps are all low, the memory is fine, the HDD is fine and it isn't a dodgy PSU either.

I don't know actually. I'll see if I can find out.

Would be nice if they'd look into it.

yeah for looking into the dual core problem!!!.....affinity has been working for me (no crashes but my fps goes down to single digits)....

Finally the people who have problems come in!

The problems do exist yes, and it would be more than nice if they would look into it yes.. from now on I'm going to try and run on two cores and see if it crashes me, but so far I only notice small problems.

Quad 32bit Vista here. No problems.

I have no such problems with Guild Wars. You should be fine running guild wars on dual core or quad core. I'm using an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ and I've had zero problems when running guild wars. A quad core might be a bit overkill. I would get a dual core that runs at 3.0 GHZ and that should cover you.

Aurora Paradox

P.S. In terms of OS if you choose Vista go with 32 bit. You won't get any benefit from getting 64 bit vista because very few applications are written to take advantage of it.
P.S.S. My dual core processor works without manually changing the processor affinity it must be a problem that occurs with only a few people's computers.

^ I have the same processor Auro.

It crashes an old game called Thief, and messes up Guild Wars.

And as mentioned by Azagoth, my computer is as well hand built by me, so I know there isn't any problems.

I've never had one single BSOD, Lock Up, or Power Down, It's just Guild Wars.. my PC is fine.

After reading Briana's first post I switched GW to utilize one core. She's right, I saw an instant improvement of about 8 FPS. And I am using an Intel 3ghz.

Weird. It's as if for some people the scheduler gets confused and lets the game run on all cores even though it's not a multi-threaded application. Could it be a driver issue?

Destroyer Core?

You don't need 64-bit apps to get use out of a 64bit OS. For example: you need a 64bit OS in order to use 4(+)GB of ram and have it see it all.


As for the people who have problems running gw with multicore cpus... I can't help but wonder if it's a configuration issue somewhere. Perhaps something is setup wrong, or something needed isn't installed.

*groan*

Think ya got us, there.