Pardon my french....

[Exist2Resist]

Holy fuck, I just upgraded from AMD Athlon II x6/HD7970 to Intel i7 5930k/R9 290x wow what a difference in performance. 

I was playing some games tonight and they were smooth as butter. Nice thing too is I have all the peripherals for the PC Wii motes and a battery powered IR sensor bar.

[AzaIndustries]

I'm not sure it was so much the step up in CPU grade as the fact you went from AMD to INTEL cpu.

Dolphin is very reliant on single/duel core high clock rates and AMD cpus don't really boast the best per core performance.
They work for most other things though, just not great for dolphin.

I have an R7250 and a G3258 and most of my experiences with dolphin can only be described as buttery smooth as well.
At 2x-3x (I don't see the need to go higher than 1080+ resolutions except for maybe supersampling type of effects?

BUT your i7 will help with the occasional heavy tittles like Super Mario Galaxy, and a few others.
Though for most dolphin games I'd consider it as a bit overkill, hopefully your using the system for more then just dolphin.

But I've become a stickler for heat, noise and power use these days, I've built so many high end PCs with rediculouse coolers and overclocks I've had my share of AAA graphics graphic graphics, I mostly play indies/old games now so I enjoy building cheap ass bang for buck PCs and squeezing the most performance out of them I can.
I end up having more fun tinkering these low end PCs then I do with my high end gear now.

[NaturalViolence]

Athlon II X6 doesn't exist. You had a phenom II X6.