NUC Advice

[AeroBCu]

Yeah, overall I'm not too picky. If say 5/7 of those games worked decently well, even if many other games didn't work I'd be happy. I'm mostly going for casual multiplayer games so I don't need to run most of the heavy CPU hog games.

[KHg8m3r]

But isn't Donkey Kong semi-demanding?
And if in the future you ever want to play games that are more demanding, the i5-4570R will provide a smoother experience

[ThePokeman92]

I have to agree about the i5, it will provide slightly better and more consistent experience, especially since it is a quad core which will allow the PC to relegate other running processes to the extra cores while Dolphin is running. Even if you don't plan on running the most demanding games it's a better option. I would be hesitant about the overheating though and perhaps look into it a bit more to see about potential solutions before the final purchase. On the other hand though, I would also be concerned with a custom GPU which might lead to problems if the driver support is poor (knowing Dell, your chances of that are higher than you would like).

[KHg8m3r]

As for overheating, I read reports (maybe on here, don't remember) about opening it up and putting on new thermal paste (Artic Silver) and it was fine

[DatKid20]

He wants this for gaming he said. Not just Dolphin. Plus the i3-4130t is just fine for demanding games as that turbo clock speed isn't for all cores anyway so the i5-4570r is acutally slower as hyperthreading doesn't slow down Dolphin enough to turn it off.

[AeroBCu]

(10-25-2014, 11:21 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: As for overheating, I read reports (maybe on here, don't remember) about opening it up and putting on new thermal paste (Artic Silver) and it was fine

Okay, that's good to know. I'll do some more research on that. I'm still leaning towards the Alienware, but it would be nice to have some safety room as far as performance. So I'm not quite sure yet.

[AeroBCu]

(10-25-2014, 11:58 AM)DatKid20 Wrote: He wants this for gaming he said. Not just Dolphin.

This is also a good point. While I came here to ask about dolphin specifically, I'm guessing having a graphics card rather than a chip is going to make the alienware better for PC games, which are typically more heavy on the GPU. So it may be more likely that I'd hit limitations on that end. Not related to the topic of dolphin's performance but another thing for me to think about.