PC Upgrade Advice

01-21-2014, 01:27 AM #1

Hi good people of the Dolphin forums,

I am after some advice around upgrading the PC I use for Dolphin. Currently I can run a lot of games well, however some (Wii Sports, Trackmania, etc) have some slow downs and glitches. I get that its not going to be perfect and some games need more that others, though I'm just looking for a good alround improvement without breaking the bank.

After doing some investigation watching the resource usage while running Dolphin, I think my money would be best spent on a new processor. The question is around which one. Currently my motherboard supports up to Ivybridge, however is it worth getting a faster sandybridge? Or upgrading the motherboard to allow for Haswell. I have around £150 to spend overall, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

My Current Specs
- ASUS P8H61-MX USB3
- Intel G2030 3GHz Dual Core Processor (Ivybridge)
- 4GB DDR 3
- NVidia GT 610 2GB
- 64 GB SSD
- Windows 8.1 (with shell replaced to XBMC)

Hope this post fits the forum rules. Thanks in advance for you advice.

**DJBarry004** · 01-21-2014, 01:32 AM #2

You could get the i5-4670K and the Z87 board. That one is good for overclocking and almost any game you want will run great.

**NaturalViolence** · 01-21-2014, 01:17 PM #3

150 pounds isn't enough to buy the parts you need to produce a substantial upgrade. Either increase your budget or don't bother upgrading.

01-22-2014, 08:01 PM #4

(01-21-2014, 01:17 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: 150 pounds isn't enough to buy the parts you need to produce a substantial upgrade. Either increase your budget or don't bother upgrading.

So moving from the Ivybridge Pentium to the Ivybridge i5 wouldn't make that much of a difference?

**NaturalViolence** · 01-23-2014, 12:03 PM #5

With overclocking you could potentially see up to a 50% boost with a 3570K at 4.2GHz. However I don't think it's worth all that money for that kind of upgrade on an old dead end platform. For a little bit more you could get a haswell cpu and motherboard which would be dramatically faster. If you wait you might even be able to upgrade to broadwell instead when it comes out.