Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I want to play viewtiful joe, wind waker, smg 1 & 2, and the metroid prime series on 2-2.5 IR. Are my parts enough?

i5 3470
radeon 7870
asrock h77m
seasonic 520w

You can safely bump your IR to 4x with that GPU.
Viewtiful Joe, Wind Waker will run great. You might experience some slowdowns at times with Super Mario Galaxy though, especially with LLE.
As for the Metroid Prime series, are you referring to the GC games or will you be playing Trilogy?

I will be playing the gc games. I was wondering whether the 3470 would have the processing power to play those games. I probably won't be able to max out prime and smg though right?

If you can afford a 3570K (or, better yet, a 4670K) and a non-stock cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO's great and it's only $30), you'll fare a lot better. Mostly because those two are both overclockable (hence the "K"), though the 4670K needs it much less than the 3570K does.

But wouldn't i need to buy a z77-87 mobo to overclock? Also, i'm on a tight budget and don't want to spend anymore than necessary. If I have to lower the settings a bit, thats fine I just don't want to play on 1 IR with no AA.

(08-31-2013, 09:30 PM)T1000 Wrote: [ -> ]But wouldn't i need to buy a z77-87 mobo to overclock?

You would

(08-31-2013, 09:30 PM)T1000 Wrote: [ -> ]But wouldn't i need to buy a z77-87 mobo to overclock? Also, i'm on a tight budget and don't want to spend anymore than necessary. If I have to lower the settings a bit, thats fine I just don't want to play on 1 IR with no AA.

The thing is, the minimum for some games is an overclocked CPU. The SMG games will need LLE audio for perfect sound (and to avoid crashes in the first SMG). If you can deal with having slowdowns, you can use the VBeam Trick (google it) and continue gaming without an OC'ed CPU. Or you could use HLE and deal with disappearing audio. LLE audio is CPU intensive, so lowering your graphical settings (which are dependent on the GPU) won't help you play at fullspeed if your CPU isn't strong enough.

The mario galaxy and prime games will both experience slowdowns in some spots.

In your situation I probably wouldn't bother upgrading just yet. But if you do I would go for a 4670K and z87 board. You're going to have to buy a new cpu and motherboard either way so you might as well upgrade to haswell instead of ivy bridge (3570K + z77) since it's much faster. Expect a 25% bump in performance.