Whatever, your choice. You know what you want/need better than I do.
Quote:That depends on what you're running (more on this later).
First of all the i5 2300 reaches 3.1GHz under load thanks to turbo boost (on any motherboard). And as I said it depends on the application. Some applications could be 8% faster on the phenom II @ 3.8GHz while other applications are 25% faster on the i5 2300, it all depends on what you're doing. Most applications will run faster on the sandy bridge. Dolphin will run faster on the i5 2300 for sure.
Just some of the many many variables to look at
External Bus Speed: sandy bridge wins
Memory speed: sandy bridge wins
Pipeline width: sandy bridge wins
Branch prediction effectiveness: sandy bridge wins
Cache size: deneb (phenom II) wins
Cache bandwidth/latency: sandy bridge wins
Clock rate: deneb wins (in this circumstance)
Number of cores: equal
Maximum integer throughput: probably about equal thanks to the higher clock rate
Maximum floating point throughput: sandy bridge wins
Maximum SIMD throughput: sandy bridge wins
Functional unit utilization (percent idle time): sandy bridge wins
I just need to know this:
What CAN'T the i5 2300 run?
Just so I won't be fooling myself.
(Oh, and that board has special hardware, it actually can overclock a non-k processor.)
It can "run" anything (as far as x86 software is concerned). The real question you should be asking is "how fast?". Quad core sandy bridge cpus are considered top of the line right now (with the exception of hexacore gultown cpus and xeon/opteron server cpus) so everything will run lightning fast on it. Most GC/Wii games should run fullspeed as long as you use HLE audio. PC games certainly won't give you any problems. Not sure about PCSX2, I don't use it, but I would have to assume that it would run well since sandy bridge is the fastest x86 microarchitecture that currently exists. Simply put if your cpu can't run it well, nothing can. I can't think of a lot of software out there that will run slow, video encoders and scientific applications maybe.
Quote:(Oh, and that board has special hardware, it actually can overclock a non-k processor.)
Well I guess that depends on your definition of "overclock". Technically turbo boost is a form of overclocking, and any motherboard can do that. The feature you're referring to is a 3-4x bump to the turbo multiplier. With the feature turned on your cpu will be able to turbo boost to 3.4GHz instead of 3.1GHz. However most people use the term overclocking to refer to a more specific type of overclocking (manual cpu core overclocking), which it is not. Also the increase to the max turbo speed does not guarantee that the cpu will actually make use of it. Turbo boost has certain power and heat restrictions which will still be applied.
(11-08-2011, 01:49 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Quote:(Oh, and that board has special hardware, it actually can overclock a non-k processor.)
Well I guess that depends on your definition of "overclock". Technically turbo boost is a form of overclocking, and any motherboard can do that. The feature you're referring to is a 3-4x bump to the turbo multiplier. With the feature turned on your cpu will be able to turbo boost to 3.4GHz instead of 3.1GHz. However most people use the term overclocking to refer to a more specific type of overclocking (manual cpu core overclocking), which it is not. Also the increase to the max turbo speed does not guarantee that the cpu will actually make use of it. Turbo boost has certain power and heat restrictions which will still be applied.
Fair enough. I actually own a Wii, so if every game I own (mostly fighting games) will run fine, then what would have trouble witth LLE audio?
Also, how would I overclock the turbo core?
Would I need a fan?
Would I see any noticeable difference?
Quote:Fair enough. I actually own a Wii, so if every game I own (mostly fighting games) will run fine, then what would have trouble witth LLE audio?
MOST games run well enough with HLE. But many games have minor audio issues with HLE that can be fixed by using LLE (music stops looping or doesn't play at all, sound effect/music volume way too high or low, video and audio out of sync during cutscenes, stuff like that). Some games have major issues with HLE (SMG/SMG2 will crash at the end of a grand star level without it).
LLE typically results in some slowdowns in heavier games even on sandy bridge and produces issues when the cpu isn't fast enough to run it at fullspeed (crackling, skipping, stuff like that). SMG/SMG2 is a great example of this.
Quote:Also, how would I overclock the turbo core?
First of all it's turbo boost, turbo core is AMDs equivalent and it works a little bit differently. I don't entirely know how you would "overclock turbo boost". Most motherboards should have a turbo multiplier that you can change, if it doesn't then you should just turn on the "limited OC" feature or whatever they decide to call it.
Quote:Would I need a fan?
If by fan you mean aftermarket air cooler, I have no idea. I don't know if the stock cooler will be enough, it probably will but I can't be sure.
Quote:Would I see any noticeable difference?
It would offer a 10% increase in performance. You'd be most likely to notice the difference in dolphin or pcsx2. Other than those two applications probably not.
What would be the best solution to run something like SMG?
Use HLE and play the stage songs on youtube?
Something else?
Play with HLE except on the grand star levels. Or play with LLE if you're willing to endure the occasional slowdowns.
(11-09-2011, 08:04 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Play with HLE except on the grand star levels. Or play with LLE if you're willing to endure the occasional slowdowns.
Any alternatives on the grand star levels?
Also, does 1 gb ddr3 vs 1 gb gddr5 on a GTS 450 mean all that much for something like dolphin?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125397
i would imagine that GDDR5 would be more useful when running a larger internal resolution or anti-aliasing, although how much of an improvement you will notice is beyond me
Quote:Any alternatives on the grand star levels?
No.
Quote:Also, does 1 gb ddr3 vs 1 gb gddr5 on a GTS 450 mean all that much for something like dolphin?
I know I've posted about this recently......
Found it (replaced GDDR3 with DDR3 because it's still correct):
Quote:When comparing DDR3 against GDDR5 a card with GDDR5 video memory won't always have higher memory performance. GDDR5 is beneficial because it allows higher frequencies to be achieved since it's a quad pumped standard (whereas DDR3 is dual pumped). However frequency is only one variable to consider when trying to calculate bandwidth, the other is the bus bitwidth (or buswidth for short). To calculate the bandwidth of the memory simply take the bitwidth of the bus, divide by 8 (since there are 8 bits per byte), and then multiple by the effective bus speed (since it's quad pumped the effective bus speed, somtimes called transfer rate, is 4 times the actual clock frequency, however most vendors post the effective speed and call it "memory clock rate" instead of the real clock rate, so you usually don't have to worry about this).
For example my GTX 260 C216 lists the memory frequency as 1998 MHz. And the buswidth as 448 bits. 448 / 8 = 56 bytes per clock. 56 * 1998 = 111888 MB/s or 111.9 GB/s rounded, which is exactly what nvidia lists. Of course bandwidth doesn't always reflect actual memory performance, there are many more variables to consider still, a lesson rdram taught us all. However because of how GPU microarchitectures are structured in this case it pretty much does. A graphics card with twice the video ram bandwidth is almost guaranteed to have twice the memory performance. Some graphics cards have GDDR5 video ram but have a very narrow bus and are therefore outperformed by cards using DDR3 memory with a much wider bus.
However in this case you're not comparing two different cards but rather the same card with two different memory standards. So whether you go with the DDR3 or GDDR5 variants they both have a 128 bit wide memory bus. This means all you need to do to compare them is look at the memory frequency. The GDDR5 variants of the GTS 450 usually have twice the frequency of the DDR3 variants according to the newegg specs therefore you can expect the GDDR5 variants to have twice the memory performance of the DDR3 variants.
Taken from here:
http://forums.dolphin-emu.org/showthread.php?tid=19672
In short: Go for the GDDR5 variant. It will likely make a big difference when running at a high internal resolution.
Quote:i would imagine that GDDR5 would be more useful when running a larger internal resolution or anti-aliasing, although how much of an improvement you will notice is beyond me
Raising internal resolution increases both shader throughput requirements and video memory bandwidth requirements. However it tends to be particularly heavy on memory bandwidth. It's particularly useful for MSAA since MSAA demands lots of memory bandwidth but doesn't increase shader throughput very much, if at all.