How will my 2011 mid-range custom-built fare against Dolphin?

[nomadic_spud]

Here is the breakdown of my PC:
*Windows 10 Home x64 architecture
*AMD Phenom II X4 965 @3.4GHZ
*PNY NVIDIA GTX 460 1GB
*Corsair DDR3 8GB (2X4)
*2 Hard Drives. My secondary will hold my games and the emulator.
*EVGA 500B power supply.

More than anything, I want to be able to play the Metroid series. I've already been messing with Dolphin and getting Metroid to run at a playable framerate is proving to be a challenge. I'll take a 30fps hit in rooms with mini-battles. I'll only stay at a constant 60 if I basically don't move or engage any of my weaponry. Or if the room has little to no activity from enemies. Even then I'll get hiccups. Running the game at its absolute minimum in settings doesn't seem to help either.

I feel like Metroid is the most demanding game, correct me if I'm wrong, and everything else will be downhill. Other games I enjoy are Mario Sunshine, Luigis mansion, and Zelda Twilight Princess.

What should my next step be? I really don't want to have to spend more money on my computer because I've already sinked about a grand. But if I really have to spend, my top dollar would be 200.

[Helios]

it's certainly not an easy game to run, although there are harder games to run.

[JonnyH]

I suspect the bottleneck will be the CPU on that. You might be able to get a good boost out of a second hand ivy bridge/haswell without replacing anything but the cpu and motherboard.

Realistically, AMD chips (Before ryzen) don't play nice with dolphin, the single-core performance of Intel's competition blows them out the water, and dolphin tends to be limited by single-core performance, so that's what you should focus on. Hell, even a Sandy Bridge i5 will likely blow the Phenom away in dolphin.

[nomadic_spud]

Maybe if I sold my old mobo and the one I'm using currently, my chip, and my old power supply, I could have enough money to get an Intel mobo/chip. What do you think? It would be a bit like recycling

[JonnyH]

(08-09-2017, 01:12 PM)nomadic_spud Wrote: Maybe if I sold my old mobo and the one I'm using currently, my chip, and my old power supply, I could have enough money to get an Intel mobo/chip. What do you think? It would be a bit like recycling

If you're buying "new" you'd probably need new ddr4 memory too, as the latest platforms don't support ddr3. It also may be worth looking at the amd ryzen stuff too, as they should be more than enough for dolphin's single-core needs, and seem to offer a full quad core at a similar price to intel's dual-core offerings.

And looking around it doesn't seem that ~5 year old intel chips are as cheap as I expected, so there are a number of options, but probably not one obviously superior choice here.

[nomadic_spud]

If the Ryzen is as good as you say, is it possible I could just buy the chip and put it on my current mobo?
The Mobo is an ASUS M5A78L-MLX Plus

[KHg8m3r]

Are you running the latest master dev build of Dolphin?

[TKSilver]

(08-09-2017, 02:40 PM)nomadic_spud Wrote: If the Ryzen is as good as you say, is it possible I could just buy the chip and put it on my current mobo?
The Mobo is an ASUS M5A78L-MLX Plus

No Zen has a different socket from every AMD platform before.  You have an AM3+ MB which is good for quite a few AMD lines..... but Zen uses AM4.  This is a good thing since AM3 really needed an update and some of the new features that were just missing from AMD's platform..

[nomadic_spud]

(08-09-2017, 03:02 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Are you running the latest master dev build of Dolphin?

Are you talking about the experimental Dolphin download? I downloaded the stable release.

[nomadic_spud]

I don't know if you guys are knowledgeable about Pc building for other games besides Dolphin. I would love to be able to play modern titles like BF1, GTA V, Overwatch, and plenty other new generation games, but for a reasonable price. I'm tired of having to shell out so much money to find that the system is outdated in a few years. Does anyone else think this is bogus?