Howdy! Long-time fan, first-time poster.
I'm looking at building an emulation rig for my living room. The goal is to make as seamless of an experience as possible while upscaling games to 1080p (3x native) resolution for the TV. Ideally I'd like to be able to handle at least 2x AA and 2x Anisotropic filtering.
As a result, I need the build to be able to keep up with (ideally) the entire Gamecube and Wii library without dropping frames, but the two games that are of upmost importance are F-Zero GX and Smash Bros Melee.
60 FPS is a must. Dropping frames and having the rig feel like it's running an emulator because of performance issues is missing the point of this build. It's supposed to feel as identical to playing the original games as possible with the added benefit of being scaled up to 1080p and not needing a handful of cluttery game consoles hooked up to the TV. The odd minor graphic glitch is fine. Performance @ 1080p is 100% top priority.
Assuming I have a high-end air cooler (to handle overclocking) and a powerful GPU, is this achievable with an i5 6600k or will I gain anything tangible from stepping up to the i7 6700k?
On a related note, what about GPU? Would a Radeon 470 cut it or should I step up to the GeForce 1060 or 1070?
I'm considering the following parts for the build:
CPU: 6600k OR 6700k
GPU: Radeon 470 OR GeForce 1060
RAM: 8 OR 16 GB. It's only about 40 bucks more for 16 GB but is there anything to be gained whatsoever for an emulator rig in my living room?
PSU: 650w should be plenty for any overclocking that happens on the build as I'll only be running a single GPU.
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My main desktop (that I'm typing this post on) is a i7 3930k Sandy bridge-E (clocked to 4.2GHz) with 64 GB of DDR 3 RAM and an R9 270x GPU. (It's a workstation machine, hence the ludicrous amount of RAM. I didn't buy that for gaming!
)
I'm curious because when running dolphin on this machine my GPU bottlenecks well before my i7 does, at least according to task manager and AMD's performance monitor. I can't maintain 60 FPS in F-Zero GX 100% of the time, mainly because my GPU maxes out. I can't tell for sure where my CPU limits are with Dolphin but Dolphin pushes it somewhat hard.
If I just build an i5 and throw a beefy GPU in it, will that do the trick at 1080p or is an i7 a safer bet if I'm looking for rock-solid 60 FPS at all times?
I'm looking at building an emulation rig for my living room. The goal is to make as seamless of an experience as possible while upscaling games to 1080p (3x native) resolution for the TV. Ideally I'd like to be able to handle at least 2x AA and 2x Anisotropic filtering.
As a result, I need the build to be able to keep up with (ideally) the entire Gamecube and Wii library without dropping frames, but the two games that are of upmost importance are F-Zero GX and Smash Bros Melee.
60 FPS is a must. Dropping frames and having the rig feel like it's running an emulator because of performance issues is missing the point of this build. It's supposed to feel as identical to playing the original games as possible with the added benefit of being scaled up to 1080p and not needing a handful of cluttery game consoles hooked up to the TV. The odd minor graphic glitch is fine. Performance @ 1080p is 100% top priority.
Assuming I have a high-end air cooler (to handle overclocking) and a powerful GPU, is this achievable with an i5 6600k or will I gain anything tangible from stepping up to the i7 6700k?
On a related note, what about GPU? Would a Radeon 470 cut it or should I step up to the GeForce 1060 or 1070?
I'm considering the following parts for the build:
CPU: 6600k OR 6700k
GPU: Radeon 470 OR GeForce 1060
RAM: 8 OR 16 GB. It's only about 40 bucks more for 16 GB but is there anything to be gained whatsoever for an emulator rig in my living room?
PSU: 650w should be plenty for any overclocking that happens on the build as I'll only be running a single GPU.
---------------------------------------------------------
My main desktop (that I'm typing this post on) is a i7 3930k Sandy bridge-E (clocked to 4.2GHz) with 64 GB of DDR 3 RAM and an R9 270x GPU. (It's a workstation machine, hence the ludicrous amount of RAM. I didn't buy that for gaming!

I'm curious because when running dolphin on this machine my GPU bottlenecks well before my i7 does, at least according to task manager and AMD's performance monitor. I can't maintain 60 FPS in F-Zero GX 100% of the time, mainly because my GPU maxes out. I can't tell for sure where my CPU limits are with Dolphin but Dolphin pushes it somewhat hard.
If I just build an i5 and throw a beefy GPU in it, will that do the trick at 1080p or is an i7 a safer bet if I'm looking for rock-solid 60 FPS at all times?