Will this work for Dolphin?

[ssnyderu2]

I have some old computer parts I was thinking of building a Dolphin PC out of. Here is the parts:

i5-760 2.8GHz (Turbo Speed 3.3GHz)
Nvidia 460
8GB DDR3
128GB SSD

I wanted this PC do be a media center as well as run Dolphin.

Thanks for any help or advice.

[Helios]

It should be okay. Not great since that's a pretty old CPU and we're pretty CPU reliant, but I imagine a lot of some games would run okay? The GPU is really dated, but I think that should be okay for lower resolutions (2x, 2.5x at most) on OpenGL. Not positive on either though. I haven't run Dolphin on old parts like that in a long time, when we were much less accurate and took a lot of shortcuts at that!

Are you buying these parts or do you have a budget you're trying to hit? You can build a pretty kickass media center that will run Dolphin perfectly for 300 bucks, maybe 350 if you want an i3 skylake system. (Excluding storage and case)

EDIT: Not so sure on the GPU now. It supports OpenGL 4.1 and I know bounding box needs more than 4.1. We also use some bits from 4.4 if available. Direct3D11 should still be supported on that GPU though, not as accurate or as fast on nvidia GPUs, but it'll work. I don't think you can use our Direct3D12 backend on a 460.

[ssnyderu2]

I have the following just lying around:

i3-2120
ATI R7870 2GB
Nvidia 480
8GB DDR3
128GB SSD

The i5-760 would cost me like $20 from a friend.

My Wii's DVD drive died, so I was thinking of building a media center that would also play Wii games, and the 1 or 2 GC games I have.

What hardware would you recommend? Budget is low, $250 or less.

[Helios]

Alright, I'll kinda go into "three builds" here. One build consisting of the parts you have, one consisting of a super cheap haswell build, one consisting of a cheap skylake build.

First build:

Use the i3 you have. It's slightly newer, and has a better base clock speed than the i5. Dolphin does it's heavy work on 2 threads, so having two more real cores vs logical cores won't help any. I'm actually a little confused on the GPU though, I'm correcting myself yet again. Graphics people in Dolphin IRC say the 400 series should support OpenGL 4.5 just fine though. Also, nvidia claims the 400 series should be able to do D3D12 but they've yet to release a driver for it.

i3-2120
Nvidia 480
8GB DDR3
128GB SSD

I didn't recommend the AMD GPU since we tend to fare better on nvidia's hardware as it is. This build should be okay. Since you have all of these parts it wouldn't hurt for you to just try it. Worst you'll lose is time.

second build:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qtgpxr - $256 after rebates - Use the RAM and storage you already have.

How this build would work is that CPU overclocks VERY well, and you can probably hit 4.2 ghz without any voltage bump at all. I got mine to 4.6 ghz with voltage bumps. I have the same mobo as well. That GPU is also fast enough to run at most internal resolutions in Dolphin up to 1440p, possibly more if you use Windows 10 and the Direct3D 12 backend, which takes a lot of work off of the GPU emulation thread. In any case, with this overclock, you'll play every game Dolphin runs as well as it would on a $1000 system.

Third build:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/4Qq7D3 - $321 after rebates - use the storage you already have.

This is just your run of the mill budget skylake build. Will run Dolphin just fine in 90% of cases. Skylake is very good. You might opt for this build over the dual core haswell if you intended on running a plex server in that media center or some more modern games. The extra threads is nice.

[ssnyderu2]

Thanks for all the great information. I think I will go with the 2nd build.

[ssnyderu2]

Helios: On your advise I picked up a Pentium G3258 at Microcenter. As a combo deal I got it and a MSI H81M-E33 for $75.00 and I get a $10 rebate on the Mobo, making the total price before tax 65.00 for both! A hell of a deal if you ask me. I will pick up the case, PSU and CPU cooler next week. So here is where I am so far:

Pentium G3258
256GB SSD (Will be running Windows 10)
2TB storage drive
8GB DDR 1600 RAM

I still need a video card. In the short term, will the built in graphics card work at standard resolution? Or should I use my ATI R7870 2GB? I will upgrade to a better Geforce card, but it maybe a couple of months or so before I can do that.

[Helios]

your AMD 7870 will be MUCH better than Intel's iGPU, even though Dolphin doesn't perform as well as it could on AMD.

Just use Direct X 11/12 if you're going to use AMD and it'll run fine.