GT 710 is a good option only for Dolphin?

[PedroSnow]

Hello everyone, my uncle has an old pc and he liked the GC when he had one (he sold him, unfortonaly), so i was looking the cheapest GPU i could find here in Brazil to upgrade his pc, and what i found was the GT 710. My question is: does this pc runs Gamecube and Wii games at 720p without any problem?

•Core 2 Duo E5400 2.7ghz
•2x2GB DDR2 (i don't remember the speed)
•GT 710

Yes, i know that an Ryzen or even Athlon APU is better, but this is what i can do for now.

[mbc07]

GT 710, although old, should be fine for 720p (perhaps even 1080p on lightweight games -- as long as you don't use ubershaders). What will certainly give you headaches, however, is that CPU. I'm not sure if it's fast enough for modern Dolphin and it's very likely you'll get CPU bottlenecks, which will force you to further drop to native resolution even though the GPU should be able to push a little more.

Anyway, it might work but I honestly can't recommend buying it, especially in 2020 (we're talking about an entry-level GPU released 5 years ago!). I'll reinforce that would be better if you saved off some money and built a new PC with a recent Athlon or A-series APU instead, even with just on-board graphics they should perform way better than an ancient Core 2 Duo with an ancient GPU like that GT 710...

[PedroSnow]

(06-19-2020, 04:41 PM)mbc07 Wrote: GT 710, although old, should be fine for 720p (perhaps even 1080p on lightweight games -- as long as you don't use ubershaders). What will certainly give you headaches, however, is that CPU. I'm not sure if it's fast enough for modern Dolphin and it's very likely you'll get CPU bottlenecks, which will force you to further drop to native resolution even though the GPU should be able to push a little more.

Anyway, it might work but I honestly can't recommend buying it, especially in 2020 (we're talking about an entry-level GPU released 5 years ago!). I'll reinforce that would be better if you saved off some money and built a new PC with a recent Athlon or A-series APU instead, even with just on-board graphics they should perform way better than an ancient Core 2 Duo with an ancient GPU like that GT 710...

Yeah, i think you're right about the CPU bottleneck
Oh, i completely forgot about the A-series APUs, maybe an A8 can run it without any much problem? Or even an G4560?

[mbc07]

The G4560 should be fine for 720p. About AMD A-series, I looked up closely and was wrong, even the most recent A-series generation (7th) still uses Excavator cores (from the terrible Bulldozer architecture) and as such they run hot and perform bad, so disregard that. The cheapest AMD you can get are the Athlon 2xxx and 3xxx models, which uses the Zen architecture and perform significantly better than the A-series...

[mstreurman]

I can really recommend the G4560 with its build in Intel HD graphics 610... that iGPU will be LOADS faster than the nVidia 710... The 710 never had a real reason to exist except for giving video output to computers that lacked a GPU or iGPU as it is actually (much) slower than the iGPU's from that era...