Considering Hardware Upgrade

[AwesomeMarioFan]

Hello again,

I currently am using the following:

CPU: E3-1280 v3 (Modified with a 4.0Ghz all-core turbo boost - AVX instructions disabled to prevent downclocking to its base clock)
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GT 1030
RAM: 12GB

I am considering upgrading to the i7-8700 which runs at 4.3Ghz-4.6Ghz turbo depending on how many cores are in use. Will there be a noticeable performance difference between the CPU that I have now (which is pretty much equivalent to a G3258 overclocked to 4Ghz) and the i7-8700 non-K?

Also another side question, when looking for a new CPU, is there a certain Dolphin benchmark score or Passmark single-threaded score to look for to run pretty much everything full speed?

[bomblord]

After some quick checking on passmark and based on my knowledge of Xeons. You should see an all around performance jump going from that Xeon to an i7-8700 with a significant jump to emulation performance in any CPU bound scenario due to the per-core performance increase

[Helios]

Do you only care about Dolphin? Your current build should be running everything at full speed with HD resolutions to begin with.

If you're not, you either have throttling issues or some software configuration problem.

[AwesomeMarioFan]

After some quick checking on passmark and based on my knowledge of Xeons. You should see an all around performance jump going from that Xeon to an i7-8700 with a significant jump to emulation performance in any CPU bound scenario due to the per-core performance increase

Thanks!

Do you only care about Dolphin? Your current build should be running everything at full speed with HD resolutions to begin with.

If you're not, you either have throttling issues or some software configuration problem.

I currently am able to run Super Mario Galaxy 1 and 2 at full speed (although I do notice the CPU core going up to ~85% usage sometimes and then slowly dropping). Since Galaxy 1&2 are going to be the most demanding games I am playing, what is the most demanding part of them that I can test?

I am experiencing an issue with Mario Kart Wii though - during Wiimmfi online races the game locks up completely for anywhere from 1-3 seconds. This normally happens 1-2 times per race, but when I open task manager it doesn't seem to be related to resources, so I am assuming it is a bug in Dolphin due to the network communication - would this be correct?.

Also a side question, how should I have Vsync configured - through Dolphin itself or the Nvidia Control Panel?