Will it help to upgrade?

[Matt2468rv]

Hi there! I have a fairly older machine in an arcade cabinet I built that I use with Hyperspin. I'd like to add Dolphin to the lineup of emulators if I could. I've tried it and on lowest settings most games are not playable due to a slowdown when anything significant is rendered. Things run smoothly in menus and in less intensive scenes but when anything too flashy is rendered (especially split screen multiplayer), it lags and becomes pretty unplayable. Here are the specs:

Dell Optiplex 745 (Small Form/Compact)

Windows 7
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
XFX AMD Radeon HD 5450 1GB GDDR3
4GB Memory

Nothing has been overclocked, and I'm not too sure how to do that.


Here's my main question: Could I get a significant speed boost by upgrading the CPU to a Core 2 Duo E6700? All I want is for things to run smoothly on the lowest settings. Is Dolphin more CPU or GPU intensive? I just upgraded the GPU, so I'd rather not do that again if I could avoid it. But if it comes down to it, I would be willing to. But I could grab an E6700 CPU on eBay for pretty cheap so I am wondering if that would actually speed things up?

Thanks for any help!

[Growlith1223]

your cpu is what you should be upgrading. would be best to avoid the Core 2s when upgrading lol, if you really can't afford much, get an I3, your gpu is fine, dolphin is more cpu intensive than anything. It would speed things up, to a point that it's almost not worth it? lol, as i said, try and get an i3 processor, or get the g3258 pentium and overclock it if you can. either one works really

[Matt2468rv]

(11-04-2014, 04:17 PM)Growlith1223 Wrote: your cpu is what you should be upgrading. would be best to avoid the Core 2s when upgrading lol, if you really can't afford much, get an I3, your gpu is fine, dolphin is more cpu intensive than anything. It would speed things up, to a point that it's almost not worth it? lol, as i said, try and get an i3 processor, or get the g3258 pentium and overclock it if you can. either one works really

Yeah, the issue with that is that I need to pick a compatible CPU for my machine. I believe the Dell Optiplex 745 is only compatible with the E6000 series dual core CPUs (E6700 being the fastest), and maybe the quad cores although they aren't "officially" supported. But from what I understand there really isn't much benefit going quad core for Dolphin vs dual? Basically I'm wondering if the E6700 is going to give me much benefit over the E6400 that's currently in the machine.

[KHg8m3r]

Even though Dolphin is a dual-core program, a quad-core is usually 10-20% faster (closer to 20% on average) in Dolphin due to the fact that it can push all the other background processes over to the two cores Dolphin doesn't use.

Upgrading your current CPU to anything in the supported socket of that computer will give you like a 5 fps increase. It's not worth it. Your best solution is to build a new computer.

You can build a very fast Dolphin computer for between $400-600:
-A G3258 on a Z97 board, overclocked to 4.4-4.7 Ghz, will give similar performance as an i5/i7-4X90K overclocked to 3.8-4.0 GHz
-A GTX 750 Ti will allow upscaling to 3-4X IR depending on the game.

Or if you go up to around $700 you can drop an i5-4690K and overclock to around 4.7 GHz (if you wanted to)

But the bottom line is: that computer has reached the end of it's line, and should be upgraded if you want to play Dolphin

[Matt2468rv]

(11-04-2014, 05:26 PM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Even though Dolphin is a dual-core program, a quad-core is usually 10-20% faster (closer to 20% on average) in Dolphin due to the fact that it can push all the other background processes over to the two cores Dolphin doesn't use.

Upgrading your current CPU to anything in the supported socket of that computer will give you like a 5 fps increase. It's not worth it. Your best solution is to build a new computer.

You can build a very fast Dolphin computer for between $400-600:
-A G3258 on a Z97 board, overclocked to 4.4-4.7 Ghz, will give similar performance as an i5/i7-4X90K overclocked to 3.8-4.0 GHz
-A GTX 750 Ti will allow upscaling to 3-4X IR depending on the game.

Or if you go up to around $700 you can drop an i5-4690K and overclock to around 4.7 GHz (if you wanted to)

But the bottom line is: that computer has reached the end of it's line, and should be upgraded if you want to play Dolphin

Thank you for the helpful reply, I really appreciate it! I might be out of luck for this setup then. I don't have the funds to build a new one currently. Am I 100% for sure bottlenecked by the CPU and not the GPU then? Because I think I could overclock the GPU pretty easily.

[natnint4000]

Yep its the CPU thats slow C2D is not really recommended for dolphin you will need a new computer

[NaturalViolence]

You could save money by reusing the video card, power supply, optical drives, and hard drives. But your cpu, motherboard, ram, and case need to be replaced since your case only supports BTX motherboards. I would highly advise upgrading the video card too if you want to run games in HD resolutions.

[Matt2468rv]

Fair enough, thanks for the recommendations guys! At least Smash Bros Melee runs smoothly most of the time! :p

[omega_rugal]

If it`s cheap get it... are you sure it doesn`t support anything higher like the E6850?

but a full upgrade is better... drop that PC...