Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Quote:Considering an i7 is only slightly faster clock per clock it's better just to get an i3/i5 and save lots of money.

except i3 and i5 is dead.

What is death?

(01-04-2011, 04:53 AM)mohmah3 Wrote: [ -> ]and it's worth buying an i3 which is only dual core instead of an AMD Phenom X4 955 which is a quad core just for dolphin ?

For sure Intel Core i3 or i5 is faster than AMD dual and quadcore for application like Dolphin. If you want a fast Intel Quadcore for a fair price then Sandy Bridge will be the smartest buy. You get performance level of the previous high-end (LGA 1366) speed for a fraction of the price.

Ok so I think that the i3 550 3.20 Ghz is the best choice for me, now I need just an advice please on the mother bord. I get a H55 or H57 one ? Asus ? Gigabyte ?

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And another question please, how dolphin takes a minimum of RAM ? 2GB is it enough?

2GB is enough but you should still get 4GB for other tasks that might use more. Get a P55 motherboard from either asus, evga, or gigabyte.

Well the AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 is better then my cpu and my cpu runs most games at 85% or higher.

Yes it is good.

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i have a AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0

You could buy i5 2300 or i5 2400, both which are faster than PII X4 965

However, if you have very limited budget then I would recommend i3 540 or i3 550
Remember that Dolphin can only use 2 cores, so a faster dual core is better than slower quad core

trust me, you don't want to buy any of the current i3's. wait for the i3 2100 or 2120 next month, or get an i5 2*00 now. the clarkdale i3's (530, 540, etc) off-die memory controller prevents them from getting full speed all the time in heavier wii games such as SMG. i know this because i had one. even overclocked to 4ghz and with a 1:1 ratio with the bus, there was still too much memory latency to run full speed all the time. the sandy bridge i3's will not have this problem as the memory controller is on-die. in fact, not only is it on-die, it's also improved, along with, well, pretty much everything. more core execution units (15 vs nehalems 12), redisgned branch prediction, with a branch target buffer that's twice the size of nehalems, faster cache, faster memory access, faster floating point maths. everything. this being the case, even though it can't be overclocked, i would expect the i3 2100 at 3.1ghz to run everything at pretty much fullspeed all the time, even SMG with LLE audio, although that's only my (mildly well-informed) guesstimate.

Quote:the clarkdale i3's (530, 540, etc) off-die memory controller prevents them from getting full speed all the time in heavier wii games such as SMG

Sandy bridge i3s will still be faster but it won't be because of the memory controller, both clarkdale and sandy bridge have roughly the same memory bandwidth and latency. Two channels running at 1333MHz by default using a memory controller connected to the cores via DMI. Only difference is that on clarkdale it's on the gpu die instead of the cpu die, but in both cases it's connected by a DMI bus with the same bandwidth. Not to mention memory latency/bandwidth only affects performance in dolphin when efb to ram is used.