Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

http://compreviews.about.com/od/maindesk...E-250f.htm

Hello guys. The past couple of days I have been doing extensive research on all these fancy technology names/numbers and stuff. I have watched Dolphin videos on Youtube,checking specs,seen what works and what doesn't,what the best processors are,the recommended RAM,the necessary video cards,read reviews,etc... Oh and I also read the PC Buying Guide from this very forum.

Still,I am far from being an expert on the matter so I decided I would try to get help from this forum.

Alright,so what I would like to do is be able to run games at maximum resolution,if possible 1080p. Although a Wii game here and there wouldn't hurt,I will be playing strictly Gamecube games...You know,the classics. And I really want to make sure that they run at full speed,preferably 60 FPS on average. I'm a bit picky when it comes to not getting the 'full experience',so if it happened to run moderately slow,that'd be a shame...

As far as the processor is concerned,I take it the Intel Core i7 920 overclocked(I saw it @ 3,8 Ghz in this one YouTube video..) is the way to go. However,the processor for this PC is an Intel Core i7-860 Quad Core. Does it make that much of a difference? And is ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphics Card With 1GB Memory good enough?

Anyway,that is too much talking from me. Please feel free to give me any suggestions on overclocking,upgrading some parts on this particular PC(I don't want to spend that much more on a dedicated gaming PC),Dolphin settings and anything else that helps.

Thanks.

I think the main differience between i7-860 and i7-920 is the socket and the data transfer speed.
i7-860 is using LGA1156 socket belong to middle class and i7-920 is using LGA1336 socket belong to high class .
Which means that you cannot upgrade your CPU into any high class CPU in the future with your LGA1156 socket motherboard.
Also i7-860 using DMI and i7-920 using QPI in their architecture.
Although I don't really know how they work but the data transfer speed between DMI and QPI is quite large.
DMI and QPI will affect the data transfer bandwith between CPU, RAM and display card.

Quote:Also i7-860 using DMI and i7-920 using QPI in their architecture.

DMI is used to connect the cpu and gpu on cpus with an integrated igp. QPI is used as the interconnect for the cpu and NB regardless of the cpu (all i3/i5/i7 cpus use qpi).

Quote:I think the main differience between i7-860 and i7-920 is the socket and the data transfer speed.
i7-860 is using LGA1156 socket belong to middle class and i7-920 is using LGA1336 socket belong to high class .
Which means that you cannot upgrade your CPU into any high class CPU in the future with your LGA1156 socket motherboard.

Not really. Regardless of which you choose you will not be able to upgrade to their next series of cpus. 2/4 core sandy bridge cpus will use socket LGA1155 and 6/8 core variants will be using socket 2011.

The difference between the two sockets is 1366 has three memory channels while 1156 has 2 memory channels and a pci-e channel (for the integrated pci-e controller).

Quote:Although I don't really know how they work but the data transfer speed between DMI and QPI is quite large.
DMI and QPI will affect the data transfer bandwith between CPU, RAM and display card.

Please look up DMI and QPI either on google or wikipedia. I have a feeling that you don't understand what they are and what they do.

Quote:And is ATI Radeon HD 5770 Graphics Card With 1GB Memory good enough?

Yes.

Quote: However,the processor for this PC is an Intel Core i7-860 Quad Core. Does it make that much of a difference?

No. Their will not be a significant difference in performance with dolphin between an i7 860 or an 9xx series cpu.

intel core i7 doesnt really need to be overclocked , i7 core @ stock settings has enough performance for dolphin

Overkill for dolphin =p but yeah what you should look for is at least 2 cores, 3ghz, and as much cache as you can find.