(01-20-2014, 09:02 AM)pauldacheez Wrote: FYI, forum support people, it doesn't take that much effort to pin down which i5 it is if you know what kind of Mac it is, what it's clocked at, and what GPU goes along with it. There's websites (e.g. everymac.com) and a mix of cross-platform/Mac-only apps (e.g. Mactracker) around that can tell you this. http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/im...specs.html
OP: The 3470 shouldn't be *too* bad for Dolphin, but all the OpenGL buffer upload methods that give massive speed boosts (e.g. VSH, pinned_memory, buffer_storage) aren't available on OS X, so there's an inherent performance impact just from using OS X's GPU drivers. Nvidia's drivers on Windows/Linux will give you better results if you're willing to install one of those. (Make sure to use a current development build too, buffer_storage was implemented a short while ago.)
If all else fails, you could upgrade that 3470 to a 3570 or 3770 (I doubt the K models are any better, considering you can't overclock) for ~$200 or ~$300... if you follow a 60-step guide. http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+2...ment/15764
I've taken apart my poor old iMac (late 2006, e.g. the last white 17" one) a few times and I've taken apart a slightly-older-than-yours 27" iMac once (for a neighbor whose son inadvertently stuck an SD card in the optical drive), and I do *not* recommend it unless you love taking apart crazy things like this that the guys at iFixit hate and have to write 60-step guides for. Personally, I love stuff like that, but it likely sounds like living hell to most.
But it's easier for us to have them tell us what they have, then us trying to guess from what little they give us
I did the same thing to an old iMac '06 17" also. pauldacheez is not exaggerating, it's not something to do if you don't know your way around how a Mac is built