Building a rig just for emulation

[admin89]

Quote:I have a gtx670 and 8gb of ram. I take it this is already more than enough, right ?
one that won't bottleneck performance with graphics maxed out

Not even close . GTX 780 (minimum) or better GPU (780 Ti , GTX Titan) . Yes we have GTX Titan user/tester
Forget about Ram . The amount of Ram doesn't matter , 4GB (2x2Gb) is good enough for 64bit OS , higher bus speed matter but not by much
You should be happy with 4x Internal Res , no AA or 2x AA , 16x AF atm (Depending on the game . You can max out graphic in some light-weight games , demanding games are out of the question)

Quote:LLE and little to no speedhacks/speedsettings as much as possible

Wihout speedhack (Vbeam speedhack and Vertex Streaming Hack ) , even the fastest heavily overclocked i5 4670k @ 4.4GHz can't help you in some demanding games
Base on Dolphin benchmark , i5 4670k @ 4.2GHz is on par with i5 3570k @ 5.0GHz
Since you already have Ivy Bridge CPU , you should wait to make a jump for Skylake (2015 or maybe longer than that) or Broadwell next year at least
But if you still want to upgrade then :
_i5 4670k
_MSI Z87 G45
_Aftermarket cooler (Depending on you budget : cheap - CM Hyper 212 Evo , recommended - Noctua DH-N14)
_Aftermarket thermal compound (Arctic MX-4 , IC diamond...)

Or you just get an aftermarket cooler + Arctic MX-4 (if you're using the crappy Intel stock fan atm) and overclock the hell out of i5 3570k (Assume you mobo must be Z75 or Z77 that support overclocking) . This is the cheapest route