potate Wrote:...anyways. I didn't think that i5 would be that great for the emulator, considering there are way more expensive processors.
You ought not judge it by how many cores/threads it has or how expensive it is. Judge it by its single-threaded performance and its clock-rate.
According to our own benchmarks, the i5-4670K consistently dominates nearly every other processor at the same clocks when it comes to Dolphin. Have a look at the Wind Waker CPU Benchmark results. Even at 3.4GHz (stock), it's a top-tier performer. Once overclocked, it beats i5-2500Ks, i7-2600Ks, i5-3570Ks, and i7 3770Ks. The only CPU that matches it is the i7-4770K. Unless you need Hypterthreading and need to use highly multi-threaded applications (video editing, encryption, compression, etc) an i7 of the same microarchitecture (Haswell in this case) at the same frequency will not perform significantly faster than a comparable i5. Dolphin is a dual-core application primarily, and can at most use 3 threads to do the majority of its processing. That is to say, an i5 would be on a level playing field as an i7 (things like having a higher cache aren't significant factors to Dolphin performance.
Sure you could spend more money on a CPU, but an i5-4670K already performs as well as any consumer hardware will presently, as it concerns Dolphin at least. Trust us, we've been figuring out which CPUs are hot and which ones aren't for Dolphin for quite some time. Unlocked "K" i5s have been the go-to CPU ever since I came to these forums (I have a 2500K), and they've proven to be the best choice for numerous Dolphin users. The latest iteration (i5-4670K) will more than handle nearly anything you can throw at Dolphin.