(02-13-2012, 06:25 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: No. Current intel chips (sandy bridge microarchitecture) perform much better than current amd chips (deneb, thuban, bulldozer) in dolphin for similar cost.
Also I should mention that you should take admin89s advice and upgrade your PSU to a more powerful unit if you plan on upgrading your graphic card down the road because overclocking your cpu could bring your peak power consumption up to 500-520w.
Thanks for the advice. As far as the PSU, I don't plan on upgrading the graphics card down the road so even with an overclocked vcore at 1.5 (to err on the side of caution), the recommended PSU is still less than 500W. I think I'm leaning towards the Antec 550W regardless of the final specs of the rig as it has great reviews.
In regards to the sandy bridge cpus, do you speculate a significant price drop when the ivy bridge chips are released? Looking at a previous gen i5 (Clarkdale i5-650), it's currently $50 cheaper on newegg than the i5 2500k so do you think there will be a similar price drop for sandy bridge?