Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello. I asked the 5 colored oracle and couldn't find a definitive answer for this and only stumpled across way outdated threads, so I thought maybe you could help.

Situation:
I have an older i7 system and want to play Resident Evil 4 with Wiimote support @ 1080p and full speed + LLE sound. (HLE gives some nasty sound glitches if there are lots of audio sources around ingame - sounds like someone tries to smash a cellphone with a microphone + It defaults to a not so nice audioloop after a few minutes of playing)

Problem:
LLE Emulation - The frames stay up to 30fps (100% speed) in most areas but can dip down to 20fps and sometimes down to 17fps on som of the larger ones. So I thought about overclocking the CPU to 4GHz to get a speed boost. I want to know, before I disassemble my PC, if this step is really worth it or if I am still stuck below 100% speed. I could get hold of an aftermarket cooler Noctua ND-D14 for free, so at least air cooling is not an issue.

System:
Mainboard: GA-X58A-UD3R
CPU: i7 950 - around 3.2 Ghz if the turboboost isn't active
RAM: GSkill DDR3 1600 - 6GB in total
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 5870
OS: Windows 8 Pro x64
PC Case: Coolermaster CM 690 II
Default MS Bluetooth Stack

Dolphin:
Currently Using Dolphin 3.5.-336
Graphic: DX9 backend
Internal Resolution: 2,5
AF: 16x
DSP LLE Recompiler
XAudio2

Other Games I plan to play:
Mario Galaxy 1 + 2 (this definitely needs LLE otherwise no music)
Xenoblade Chronicles
Pandoras Tower
StarFox Assault (GC)

Well, Fullspeed al the time @ LLE is not possible. But an overclock would heavily increase your performance. As your i7 is a bit older, you shoould overclock to 4.2Ghz or more.

Yeah, I suspected, i couldn't sqeeze 100% with this old rig. I think I default to playing on my Hometheater PC which has an Intel i5 2550K which strangly gives me a much better performance, but cannot be overclocked (no settings in BIOS and the thing is squeezed on an mITX board and a smallform case).

Yeah, this i5 (Sandy Bridge) is based on a much more modern CPU architecture. That's why you get better performance.

All the games you listed are very demanding. An overclock will help you of course. But, either you forget LLE and most games will work fine, either you use LLE but you'll have to deal with speed drops

Thanks for your replies, you saved me a 2h trip and an afternoon of PC building and BIOS fiddling. I may look into playing the emulated Wii version of RE4 again in the future - maybe some future changes in Dolphin or more powerfull PC plattforms allow for a better Wii Emulation experience. But I will peek in here for time to time.

In the meantime I will enjoy Xenoblade in HD on my HTPC. This game runs beautifully. Also thanks to the Dolphin developers and their efforts.