i7-4790K vs. i5-4690K vs. Xeon E3-1231

[Torres87]

Hello Girls and Guys,

at the moment im building a Gaming-HTPC. I want play the these Games in 1080p with 4 friends (Multiplayer) on 60 FPS.
-Mario Party
-Mario Kart
-F-Zero
-Timesplitters
-Maybe some Wii Games too
-(No Zelda!)
-And some current/future PC-Games (Project Cars, the next GTA, Metal Gear)

I´ve already read that Dolphin is CPU demanding so i need help to choose the right CPU for that. I´ve picked three CPU´s for the further selection:
1. i7-4790K 4x4,0 GHz (300 Euros)
2. i5-4690K 4x3,5 GHz (205 Euros)
3. Xeon E3-1231 v3, 4x 3.40GHz (215 Euros)

Pro and Contra:
-The i7 and i5 have a iGPU.
-The Xeon and the necessary Mainboard would be the cheapest of all.
-The i7 and i5 can be OC (but i have no experience in it and my Chase is so small there is no place for Water or Big Air-Tower Cooling!!!)

Which of thoose CPU´s would you recommended?. Would be the clockspeed (on stock, No OC!) of 4x 3,5 GHz (i5-4690k) enough to play these games on my prefered settings (1080p, 60 FPS with 4 friends playing together?!)

Big thanks. You guys doing a great works!

[DJBarry004]

You can also count on G3258. You can overclock higher than 4.0 GHz with Intel stock cooler.

[natnint4000]

Get the i7 4790k, especially since you mentioned 4 player the stock clock on that is perfect

[Shonumi]

Any of them should be more than enough to run all of the games you want, without overclocking if you use the very latest development revisions (see https://dolphin-emu.org/download/ 4.0-3518 is the latest as of this writing). These builds have massive speed improvements, so you shouldn't have any trouble with any of them.

If you want 1080p gaming, the IGPs in the 4790K and 4690K will do fine for most games, that is to say in most games you can play at 2.5x or 3x the GC/Wii's native resolution without bottlenecking the GPU. Some games in Dolphin are more demanding on the GPU than others (Super Mario Galaxy is a big one) so for those, you may have to turn down the graphical quality to maintain fullspeed. But from the looks of your list, you shouldn't have much trouble with any titles. If you have anymore specific games in mind, we can tell you if they're demanding on the GPU or not.

As for which CPU to get, I'm going to say the i5-4690K. Dolphin is primarily a dual-core application, that is to say it uses two threads to do the vast majority of its work under normal conditions. The i7-4790K has little advantage over the i5-4690K with respect to Dolphin, besides the obvious speed differences in stock and Turbo Boost (but the games you want to play will run fine on either regardless...) It can also overclock in case you ever need it (doubtful given how fast Dolphin has become and how fast Haswell was for Dolphin to begin with), and it has a higher clock than the Xeon, and it's cheaper than the i7-4790K. Of course this sounds like it would require you to buy a new motherboard, but with the Xeon, it also sounds like you'd be looking for a dedicated GPU. So I guess it comes down to whether you want to buy a new motherboard or GPU, and I'm partial to sticking with Intel's IGP.

natnint4000 Wrote:Get the i7 4790k, especially since you mentioned 4 player the stock clock on that is perfect

The i7-4790K (as I said above) won't have any serious advantages over the i5-4690K when it comes to Dolphin (aside from clock). Dolphin will still have more than enough processing power available for 4-player action with the i5-4690K. Dolphin doesn't factor in Hyperthreading, and 4 cores is enough to handle Dolphin's two main threads (CPU and Video emulation) along with anything else (input and background stuff). There's the higher clock, but also the higher price. For what the OP wants, an i7-4790K is a bit overkill.

[Torres87]

@DJBarry004
Yeah the price/performance is the best but i want to play in the future some new PC-Games so i need atleast 4 Cores.

@Shonumi
Big Thanks for the detailed explanation! Yeah my idea was to stay first with the iGPU and try out what is possible and maybe at the beginning of 2015 to switch for a new GTX 9xx or so!

The Idea of the HTPC was to play GC, Wii, N64 and PS2 with friends together, so more multiplayer (PvP) Games!

[NaturalViolence]

4690K offers by far the best bang for your buck out of these three options.