Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So I am looking to do a build using an APU as in the build I will have very limited room and heat displacement. As the device will be a HTPC as well.

I am looking at a Haswel i5 or an AMD A-10 APU again I am unable to use a discrete GPU so please don't suggest that. I will be running with good ram as I am well aware that the APU's benefit significantly from the speed boost in the RAM.

Depending on the feed back I can get I will be happy to do a table of frame rates people can get from various GPU less hardware if people want to post that.

Bottom line will either an i5 or an A-10 run Wii games well or at least GameCube games well, do I need a GPU? If it is not possible I will have to drop Dolphin support from the emulators I will be running.

If you think Dolphin is more important than PC games , i5 4670k will be a better choice than anything else
Intel HD 4600 can handle 2x Internal Resolution in most games or even 2.5x IR (1600x1320) in some light-weight games
Dolphin is a CPU demanding application . If you play a GPU demanding game like Mario Kart , you will have GPU bottleneck at 2.5xIR but you can overclock your CPU to make up for it (Well , i'm pretty sure the haswell i5 stock speed is overkill for Mario Kart unless you setup multiplayers with your friends )

A10 6800k iGPU performance should be somewhere between AMD 6670 -> 7750 DDR3 . It's obviously much ....much faster than Intel HD 4600 in PC gaming .

On the other hand , Dolphin : Only single-threaded performance matter . A10 6800k is a factory OC version of A10 5800k . Base on Dolphin Benchmark , a low-mid range like A10 6800k will never come close to high-end i5 4670k in term of CPU performance (You'll get what you pay for)

If you choose i5 4670k , you may want to pair it with Z87 mobo and a decent slim heatsink like this one . Mild OC (4.0GHz+) shouldn't be a problem

If you can wait until Jan 14 go with Kaveri.