(05-04-2022, 11:21 PM)chocolates Wrote: Is a GTX 750 ti worth $115 new?
That's actually not bad considering that its performance is sadly pretty similar to GDDR5 GT 1030 which, when launched, tended to max out at.around that price
I'm guessing the used market isn't something you're interested in? Those go for like $70 or so on ebay for example.
Now it being a lower-end GPU does mean that it'll be a bit useless compared to integrated graphics if you ever want to upgrade your PC as a whole, but there is the side-benefit that the GPU is old enough to actually have good support on Linux (newer Nvidia GPUs can be problematic) which could be useful in the future if you ever want to repurpose your old PC into a dedicated emulation-machine SteamOS or the like (when SteamOS 3.0 actually gets released as a generally-available OS and not something exclusive to the Steam Deck of course!)
(05-04-2022, 11:21 PM)chocolates Wrote: And my computer has DDR2 Ram. If I changed the board and cpu, would I not have to change the Ram as well? I thought newer boards used DDR4 and stuff.
Yes, newer stuff wants DDR4 (or even DDR5), but the thing was that some Core 2 Duo systems used DDR3 which is the same ram used by 4th and 5th gen Intel (Haswell and Braodwell respectively). And, for whatever reason, Haswell brought substantial performance gains for emulation to the point that it took until Zen2 to match it specifically for emulation because emulation seemed to be one of the worst-case scenarios for AMD until Zen3. This is why I mentioned the Pentium G3258 which, nowadays, is basically a one-trick pony for great emulation performance on an extreme budget (with the caveat that it only being dual core means that it can't really emulate any console that had multiple CPU cores such as the PS3, Xbox 360, and maybe even the 3DS, but some of those require AVX support anyway which the G3258 also lacks).
...but if buying used isn't desired then the G3258 and/or any other 4th gen/Haswell CPU isn't really an ideal option anyway as it's specifically its price on the used market that makes it a deal, not on the new market (is it even available anywhere?).
Dolphin 5.0 CPU benchmark
CPU: Xeon E3-1246 v3 (4c/8t Haswell/Intel 4th gen) — core & cache @ 3.9GHz via multicore enhancement
GPU: Intel integrated HD Graphics P4600
RAM: 4x8GB Corsair Vengence @ DDR3-1600
OS: Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce + [VM] Win7 SP1 x64
CPU: Xeon E3-1246 v3 (4c/8t Haswell/Intel 4th gen) — core & cache @ 3.9GHz via multicore enhancement
GPU: Intel integrated HD Graphics P4600
RAM: 4x8GB Corsair Vengence @ DDR3-1600
OS: Linux Mint 20.3 Xfce + [VM] Win7 SP1 x64