GW2 & AMD using WINE - advice / help appreciated

[Fuin]

Hello everyone ,
I'm thinking of buying the build listed below (after my old one went POP!) & running it with LINUX instead of WINDOWS, but am a complete newbie when it comes to LINUX
I've read that I can use WINE to play GUILD WARS 2 which is mostly what we will use this computer for.
I would love to use LINUX and take part in the community-run OS but am clueless so would really appreciate any advice, opinions or help anyone can give about the potential pitfalls of this setup before I buy it without WINDOWS :

Case : Cooler Master Silencio 450
CPU : AMD FX 6200 (6 x 3.8 GHZ)
CPU Heatsink : Corsair Hydro Series H60 V2 (Advanced Liquid Cooling)
Memory : 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair DDR3 Vengeance LP Cerulean Blue, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 9-9-9-24, XMP, 1.5V
Graphics Card : 2GB XFX Radeon HD 7850 DD Black Edition, 5000MHz GDDR5, 28nm, GPU 975MHz, 1024 Cores, DL DVI/HDMI/mDP
Motherboard : Gigabyte 990FXA-D3 (AMD 990FX)
Power Supply : Corsair 800W Gaming PSU
Hard Drive : 120GB Corsair Force Series 3, 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s, SandForce SSD, Read 550MB/s, Write 510MB/s, 85K IOPS

Thanks for any help you can give...have a wonderful day!
Fuin

[L. Rahyen]

If you plan to run Linux, it is better to get NVidia card. If you want to know why, read this.

[Freeze_XJ]

I think that horse has been beaten to death now, both companies provide OK-ish drivers. Stuff works, stuff doesn't work. Over the whole, it works. I've fared pretty badly with my olde NVidia, years ago (6600 GT), and my current AMDs are OK. Doesn't mean much, but it sure as heck does run GW2 properly. If however you do believe the common rumour, stay away from any Sandforce-HDD (exception for Intel) because of issues with data corruption and sudden failures.

As for the cooling: I don't know how much a H60 costs you, but in my opinion watercooling isn't worth it until you do it a bit bigger (the H100 is a solid one for example). The H60 is a nice cooler, no doubt, but it's small (so at higher loads like OCing won't be as cool as a high-end air cooler) and is more expensive too. An A50, or old TRUE (or another of the current 14-cm-monsters) will probably do the job just as well. It depends a bit on what you plan to OC
Case: SPCR isn't convinced by the 450, I'd personally take an Antec 300, or on a real budget: Bitfenix Outlaw. There's tons of good cases though, and it's worth peering through reviews.

As for hardware combined with Linux: most stuff works perfect, with a few weird manufacturers (Creative I'm looking at you) lagging. GW2 will mostly rely on your CPU for the moment, at least until the last issues with it are solved (work in progress). However, with a 7850 or likewise (various 560-options) you should be looking at 20-ish FPS with a lot of things on 'full'.