EvanOz85 Wrote:And yet I can play Crysis 3 at max settings without issue..
Dolphin is not a modern PC game. Modern PC games and emulators like Dolphin are two very different programs. Crysis 3 doesn't even come close to doing most of the same workloads that Dolphin does (recompiling PowerPC assembly for one). They're simply two separate beasts. Crysis 3 is a very GPU intensive program and relies on the GPU for a lot of its performance. Dolphin, on the other hand, is largely CPU intensive for many games. The GPU in Dolphin is responsible for things being able to raise your Internal Resolution and Anti-Aliasing without suffering slowdowns because of a GPU bottleneck. If you lower your IR and turn off all AA and you still get slowdowns, this is indicative of a CPU bottleneck, since your GPU is doing minimal work in that scenario.
Some other things to note, Dolphin does not take advantage of Hyper-Threading, and under normal circumstances it is only a dual-core application, so Windows Task Manager should show you roughly 25% of your available CPU resources being used. Lastly, Dolphin does not take advantage of SLI.
Now for the heart of your problem, your CPU is actually very good for Dolphin. Haswell kicks ass for Dolphin (20+% increase in performance from Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge) whereas most applications only see a 5% gain. 3.7GHz should be enough to blow away most any game. KEY and Xenoblade Chronicles should not be giving you slowdowns, since I can run both without slowdowns and my specs are below yours. All Metroid Prime games are demanding, and MPT especially, but you still should be fine. SMG with LLE audio is very CPU intensive, but some users have reported playing this game under LLE audio with similar hardware with no overclocking. It looks like a case of bad Dolphin settings.
Even if you think you've tried every combo under the sun, it's always best to let another pair of eyes look at what you've got set. If you would, please take screenshots of the following: click the Graphics button and go to the General, Enhancements, and Hacks tabs, click on the Config tab and go to the General and Audio tabs, and finally right-click one game (say SMG for example) in Dolphin and go to Properties -> GameConfig. That should be all we need to see. Hopefully it's just a few things that need tweaks.