Haswell chips are still pretty capable today (those celerons were awful though even back then), i used to have a pentium g3220 years ago and it ran dolphin at full speed (at least the stuff that i wanted to play), then again i didn't really play any of the intense stuff on that particular chip anyways. In the end i actually got a core 2 quad q9400 for free from a store that was throwing away an old lenovo station, i didn't do anything with it yet but when i get some time i'll clean it up and get either debian or ubuntu on it since windows 10 seems to act up on those particular g40/h40 chipsets and windows 11 is of course not even an option. I do have an i3 2120 but i don't have a compatible motherboard anymore and 2nd gen boards are notorious for their crappy components so i'm not even gonna try to find one unless it's something cheap to fix like a corrupt bios or something. Windows 7 has the issue with the dts certificate that expired last week and though it is easy to fix i'd rather save myself some maintenance, plus i don't like running older graphics drivers so i'll go with linux for this.
BTW back in the day i used windows 8 up untill 10 came out and emulation worked a lot better than it did on windows 7 (probably because i was running an amd fx chip on that one system and support for those was limited on 7), maybe 8.1 should replace 7 for lower end systems since it is at least still supported.
Though none of this fixes the fact that i'm still left with a bunch of e-waste lol maybe it would be a good idea to donate it but some of it is so old.
BTW back in the day i used windows 8 up untill 10 came out and emulation worked a lot better than it did on windows 7 (probably because i was running an amd fx chip on that one system and support for those was limited on 7), maybe 8.1 should replace 7 for lower end systems since it is at least still supported.
Though none of this fixes the fact that i'm still left with a bunch of e-waste lol maybe it would be a good idea to donate it but some of it is so old.