HP 8300 SFF Emulation Machine

[Dennio]

Hey Guys,

I am going to try to explain what I want to do, what I already have, what I am planning to do and ask you if that will be possible.
I "simply" want to play MKDD, Smash Football and Bros. Brawl in 1080p with 4 People/Controllers.

I just bought an HP 8300 SFF Desktop PC with an i5 3470, 4 GB RAM DDR3 1600 MHz and Win 10 Pro. I'm gonna post some pictures here when it arrives. Just cost me 70 € on eBay-Kleinanzeigen (kind of German Craigslist)

Upgrades:
- Expanding the RAM with one or even two additional 4 GB Sticks of RAM

- Adding a Low Profile GPU. Here comes my first question: which one? My Options are:
- GT 1030 2GB
- GTX 750 Ti 2GB
- GTX 1050 2GB
- GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
- RX 550 2 GB
- RX 550 4 GB
Like I said 1080p is my goal here. Maybe you can suggest which one will or will not be cabable for the job and which one will be overkill.

- The CPU and yes I made a different post where it was pretty clearly pointed out that Dolphin is very CPU-Demanding. So I bought an i5 2500k for 20 € just to realize I cannot overclock it with the HP Motherboard. But I bought some thermal paste so at least I can see if the 2500k is a little improvement with its slightly higher base- and turboclockspeed. If both CPUs won't work I'm goingt to search for a cheap z77 MoBo or for an i7 3770.

- Adding an SSD just to make this machine more enjoyable

- Of course a GameCube Controller USB Adapter

I mean ETA PRIME shows pretty amazing results with an i5 2400 and a GT-1030: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=andQScij0S8&t=624s

If I could get these wonderful 60 FPS whilst playing with my friends I would be the happiest dude alive.

I hope it was all very self explaining and would be happy to read your comments and opinions.

Greetings
Dennis

[JonnyH]

For 1080p, pretty much all your games will work on any of the GPUs you listed - so it's likely more about price or if you intend to do more (a rx550 and gt1030 are about the same speed, the 750ti a little faster than that, and the 1050 or even 1050ti will massively outperform that - which may be useful to play other games or have more power in hand to do SSAA or similar at 1080p).

You're right in saying that some games may have issues with the 3470 - dolphin (for some reason) really likes the haswell (Core 4xxx) and above, so before that you'll likely need to ensure you get good clocks - so make sure your cooling is up to snuff in the SFF case so it won't throttle. Dolphin doesn't take advantage of the hyperthreading the i7 gives over the i5, so the only advantage for the 3770 will be the max turbo - which is less than 10% faster than the 3570 - so it won't turn an "unplayable" game to "great", but it might make it slightly smoother if you're right on the limit.

One thing to possibly be aware of is to make sure you use dual channel ram (IE two matched DIMMs) when possible. Hopefully your 4gb is actually 2x2gb so you already take advantage of that. Otherwise 4gb of ram is more than enough for dolphin (assuming you're not using any HD texture packs). Same with the 2gb vram GPUs, they're fine, but be aware sometimes the smaller ram version is a little slower (either just a smaller memory bus, or even a different GPU like the nvidia 1060 3gb having fewer cores than the 6gb one .