EDIT for future readers:
I went with the i3-4160. It's fullspeed in tested games so far. Note that you need to set the affinity on the Dolphin process to two cores, to avoid hyperthreading constantly interrupting the threads. Metroid Prime is a bit microstutter-y, but this seems to be more of a GPU thread issue since CPU usage doesn't spike at those times. Still investigating.
It's also running modern games very well and makes for an extremely smooth desktop.
Original post below.
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The ancient, awful Athlon in my profile fails entirely at running basically any interesting game, as I'd expect, so it's time to get a new CPU (and mobo). The FAQ basically says I want a Haswell chip with a good clock speed, and core count is almost irrelevant.
Since I have a low budget, it looks like the G3258 with a cheap mobo that supports overclocking would be the way to go there, since it can be trivially OCed to 4+GHz. However, I also want to run new PC games with the chip, and I understand that two hardware threads isn't going to cut it anymore for any game engine expecting 4 hardware threads; it also has no hardware virtualisation or AES-NI, and some other missing instruction sets.
So: Would an i3-4160 (that's 3.6GHz) run most games at fullspeed under Dolphin? I know there are a few outliers that need insane power- my main interest is the Metroid Prime games and Mario Kart DD/Wii. Mario Galaxy would be nice too.
(I do understand that the Metroids are unfortunately three of the more demanding games. )
I went with the i3-4160. It's fullspeed in tested games so far. Note that you need to set the affinity on the Dolphin process to two cores, to avoid hyperthreading constantly interrupting the threads. Metroid Prime is a bit microstutter-y, but this seems to be more of a GPU thread issue since CPU usage doesn't spike at those times. Still investigating.
It's also running modern games very well and makes for an extremely smooth desktop.
Original post below.
----
The ancient, awful Athlon in my profile fails entirely at running basically any interesting game, as I'd expect, so it's time to get a new CPU (and mobo). The FAQ basically says I want a Haswell chip with a good clock speed, and core count is almost irrelevant.
Since I have a low budget, it looks like the G3258 with a cheap mobo that supports overclocking would be the way to go there, since it can be trivially OCed to 4+GHz. However, I also want to run new PC games with the chip, and I understand that two hardware threads isn't going to cut it anymore for any game engine expecting 4 hardware threads; it also has no hardware virtualisation or AES-NI, and some other missing instruction sets.
So: Would an i3-4160 (that's 3.6GHz) run most games at fullspeed under Dolphin? I know there are a few outliers that need insane power- my main interest is the Metroid Prime games and Mario Kart DD/Wii. Mario Galaxy would be nice too.
(I do understand that the Metroids are unfortunately three of the more demanding games. )