Yes. I can confirm what helios747 has said. I have a similar MSI laptop (GP60 2QE) with a GT940M (much less powerful GPU) but with the same exact CPU and I'm able to run most games at 2-2.5x. The bottleneck will probably be the GPU, not the CPU.
Per-pixel lightning does make some games look a bit more realistic.
Fast depth calculation does not "downgrade the graphics"; it just speeds up the emulation but can cause issues in some games. You shouldn't need to disable it manually though, since the GameINIs will normally take care of that for you.
As for Skip EFB Access from CPU, you should generally leave it disabled since it breaks some games (partially) as indicated in the description.
You won't be able to see the difference if you use anything beyond 3x. Unless you include the slowdowns that you might get from going above 3x
One last thing. A HDD is already much faster than a DVD drive, so it does not really matter for Dolphin. However, a SSD is much faster and will provide a better experience if you install your OS on it, and also if you have large texture packs for Dolphin (it reduces loading times, but it won't make games faster).
Per-pixel lightning does make some games look a bit more realistic.
Fast depth calculation does not "downgrade the graphics"; it just speeds up the emulation but can cause issues in some games. You shouldn't need to disable it manually though, since the GameINIs will normally take care of that for you.
As for Skip EFB Access from CPU, you should generally leave it disabled since it breaks some games (partially) as indicated in the description.
You won't be able to see the difference if you use anything beyond 3x. Unless you include the slowdowns that you might get from going above 3x
One last thing. A HDD is already much faster than a DVD drive, so it does not really matter for Dolphin. However, a SSD is much faster and will provide a better experience if you install your OS on it, and also if you have large texture packs for Dolphin (it reduces loading times, but it won't make games faster).