New computer, bad performance

[ibejustin]

Hey all, so I just recently built an arcade cabinet with all my favorite childhood games in it from the original Atari to Nintendo Gamecube. It runs off a Dell Optiplex 755 that I purchased on eBay for about a hundred bucks. I recently purchased an EVGA GT 730 1GB GDDR5 for another hundred bucks to give it the boost I thought it needed to be able to play Gamecube games, but unfortunately I haven't been able to get good performance. The specs of the PC are:

Windows 7 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.00GHz
2GB RAM
GT 730 1GB GDDR5

I figured this would be enough to run Dolphin at low settings and I am fully willing to accept that HD is never going to happen, but even with the resolution turned down to the lowest setting I still can't play games without major lag (20-40 fps). A few of the games I've tried playing so far include: Simpsons Hit & Run, Sonic Adventure DX, SSBM, Guitar Hero (Wii), and Ghost Squad (Wii). Surprisingly, Melee and Ghost Squad work pretty well with the occasional framerate dip, but the other two are unplayable. It's weird because before I installed the new GPU it seemed like I was getting better performance from the crappy integrated graphics, which leads me to believe that Dolphin is not taking advantage of the GT 730 despite it being selected in the settings.

I downloaded EVGA's Precision X program to monitor my GPU as Dolphin runs, and it appears to be hitting the full clock speed of around 901MHz when playing games, so now I'm really confused. I read that the GT 730 is basically a rebranded gt 630 and after watching videos on Youtube of folks playing games at full 1080p without any problems, I'm led to believe that there is something I'm doing wrong as far as my configuration goes. I'm throwing a Halloween party tomorrow night and I'd really like to have the arcade running at full force by then, so any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks guys!!

[ExtremeDude2]

I recently purchased an EVGA GT 730 1GB GDDR5 for another hundred bucks

Rip off much? But srly, your CPU is way to slow (old) it may have been the GPU bottlenecking you before, but now the CPU is.

[ibejustin]

I recently purchased an EVGA GT 730 1GB GDDR5 for another hundred bucks

Rip off much? But srly, your CPU is way to slow (old) it may have been the GPU bottlenecking you before, but now the CPU is.

With shipping it was around 80 I think. So am I SOL as far as anything on Dolphin goes? Unless of course I go out and buy a new PC with an i5 and a gt 750...

I figured what I had was enough to get decent gameplay on the lowest of the low settings.

[AnyOldName3]

A Pentium G3258 is more than enough for the vast majority of games, and it's pretty cheap. Also, a GTX 750 Ti *should* be around the price you paid for the 730, and is far more powerful. If you can still return the 730, and then buy a new motherboard and the G3258 (and optionally a 750 Ti) then you might be able to get something adequate without breaking the bank too much.

[omega_rugal]

For the millionth time

Dolphin is not a PC game

get a Good CPU if you want speed

[NaturalViolence]

Your cpu and gpu are both too slow and you overpayed for the 730 big time as others have stated. If you have to choose then upgrade the cpu first.

[KHg8m3r]

I'm 90% sure that the motherboard is a BTX style board. So you would need to either modify the case (hard) to support ATX standard boards or get a new case. (say this because I have used this platform before and you are pretty SOL)

I have a Dell Dimension 9200 with a Q6600 and a GT 740. On earlier 4.0-dev builds (around 4.6xx or so), I could get almost fullspeed in Brawl. Since the latest dev builds are faster and your CPU is slightly faster than mine in terms of Dolphin, you should be able to hit fullspeed.

The only way to maybe get the games to run faster is to get the latest dev builds, make sure under Power Options for Windows you're set to max performance, and set up some lighter games.

If you set up a two person game of Smash bros Melee/Brawl on the latest dev builds at the native resolution, it may be able to make full-speed. Get a buddy to help you out by running at least every character through each stage to start filling up the shader cache (so there won't be any micro-stuttering when people try to play).

This will be a short term fix for tomorrow, but in the long run you'll want to sell that computer and build your own. You can build a great Dolphin for around $400-500