Honestly, for Dolphin, none of them are really good choices. Dolphin is primarily a single core program so it relies on single threaded performance (the combination of instructions per clock and frequency). The single threaded performaance increase from a Core 2 Duo to now is enormous. Passmark, a historical but important bench since it goes waaaaay back, has the core 2 duo and modern processors. A Core 2 Duo e6600 (a CPU I have owned) has a single thread score of 948 there. The Ryzen 5900x has a score of 3381. Dolphin isn't necessarily their workload, but you can roughly expect three times the performance in Dolphin on the 5600x. Yea, that's a lot.
Dolphin is faster compared to then, but let me tell you, Dolphin on my old Core 2 Duo was work. With a hearty overclock it was baaarely able to maintain fullspeed in most games and could even handle some hard games too. But other games, like The Last Story and Metroid Prime 3 were just out of reach.
For Dolphin use, I do not recommend any oof these. Even a latest gen Core i3 would give you many times the performance at a fraction of the power use. I definitely do not recommend spending money for these if Dolphin is your goal, get something like a used coffee lake processor instead and you'll get far, far more performance for Dolphin. But if it is just ewaste and you are preventing them from ending up in the bin, there is still a lot of use to be had from them. Just, temper your expectations of Dolphin performance.
Dolphin is faster compared to then, but let me tell you, Dolphin on my old Core 2 Duo was work. With a hearty overclock it was baaarely able to maintain fullspeed in most games and could even handle some hard games too. But other games, like The Last Story and Metroid Prime 3 were just out of reach.
For Dolphin use, I do not recommend any oof these. Even a latest gen Core i3 would give you many times the performance at a fraction of the power use. I definitely do not recommend spending money for these if Dolphin is your goal, get something like a used coffee lake processor instead and you'll get far, far more performance for Dolphin. But if it is just ewaste and you are preventing them from ending up in the bin, there is still a lot of use to be had from them. Just, temper your expectations of Dolphin performance.
![[Image: RPvlSEt.png]](https://i.imgur.com/RPvlSEt.png)
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