Want to run as many games as possible at full speed, will I need to OC my APU?

[mbc07]

If you want decent performance in Dolphin, Intel is the way to go (the cheapest route for full speed in practically all games is Pentium G3258 + OC and a compatible motherboard). But from a quick read it seems that you're tied to AMD because of your current motherboard, in that case, I don't know what to recommend to you since I don't have enough knowledge of AMD lineup...

[NKF98]

the newer Phenoms are relatively cheap and I've heard good things about them with dolphin

[DeeKay]

That particular APU should actually have no problems with Xenoblade Chronicles. I'm running it at full speed at 1080p on my old Phenom II X4 955 (circa 2009).

Granted the APU only has a marginal performance benefit over my CPU, but it will perform better regardless. I'm still going to agree with everyone else that if you want to have a good time with Dolphin, go with Intel. AMD just can't compete performance-wise against them.

[ZippoMoon]

Want about the i7 line?

[lucas720]

i7's are great, but only offer a marginal improvement over i5's in dolphin. If hyper threading for pc games are not important then I can recommend the i5 4690k. You can also wait until intel skylake launches later this year. Even if you don't get skylake, I recommend you wait so the 4690k and z97 mobos go down in price.

[NKF98]

*4690k going down in price
lol

hyperthreading is a useless feature in terms of gaming, it can even make things run slower occasionally

[DatKid20]

(07-30-2015, 08:16 AM)NKF98 Wrote: *4690k going down in price
lol

hyperthreading is a useless feature in terms of gaming, it can even make things run slower occasionally

Not true at all. The i3 is consistently better then the G3258 in multithreaded games even when the G3258 is overclocked.

[mbc07]

(07-30-2015, 10:37 PM)DatKid20 Wrote: Not true at all. The i3 is consistently better then the G3258 in multithreaded games even when the G3258 is overclocked.

Not because of hyperthreading, it's because i3 has a higher DRAM frequency support and a higher L3 cache, supporting also some instruction sets not available in G3258 (like AVX and AES-NI). And yes, in most cases hyperthreading is a useless feature in terms of gaming. And considering solely Dolphin performance, G3258 with OC outperform any i3 currently available...

[mimimi]

Hyperthreading is a useless feature in terms of gaming using Dolphin. Dolphin only uses 2-3 cores, maybe with the OS and everything it goes up to 4 in some situations. If you have 4 cores with HT, you don't want anything to run in a hyperthreading thread, because those actually run very slow. This is an advantage, if the choice is a) run the thread slow or b) wait for a while and then share one core for 2 threads. But with 4 cores and 2-3 main threads, you want every main thread to run on a full core, and then there's still a spare full core for background stuff and whatnot.

[NKF98]

maybe if your games are using all available cores, which is not always the case. games don't (and won't) utilize HT technology for some time, until it becomes more standard, if it even ever does at all. if I understand correctly, hyperthreading splits core usage, and isn't smart enough to dedicate cores to one thread, although i could be wrong about that part. you can't say a feature is good for a use if it's only utilized is specific situations (things running in the background and all available cores used w/ game) and not do anything/slow performance the rest of the time