Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hi good people of the Dolphin forums,

I am after some advice around upgrading the PC I use for Dolphin. Currently I can run a lot of games well, however some (Wii Sports, Trackmania, etc) have some slow downs and glitches. I get that its not going to be perfect and some games need more that others, though I'm just looking for a good alround improvement without breaking the bank.

After doing some investigation watching the resource usage while running Dolphin, I think my money would be best spent on a new processor. The question is around which one. Currently my motherboard supports up to Ivybridge, however is it worth getting a faster sandybridge? Or upgrading the motherboard to allow for Haswell. I have around £150 to spend overall, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

My Current Specs
- ASUS P8H61-MX USB3
- Intel G2030 3GHz Dual Core Processor (Ivybridge)
- 4GB DDR 3
- NVidia GT 610 2GB
- 64 GB SSD
- Windows 8.1 (with shell replaced to XBMC)

Hope this post fits the forum rules. Thanks in advance for you advice.

You could get the i5-4670K and the Z87 board. That one is good for overclocking and almost any game you want will run great.

150 pounds isn't enough to buy the parts you need to produce a substantial upgrade. Either increase your budget or don't bother upgrading.

(01-21-2014, 01:17 PM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]150 pounds isn't enough to buy the parts you need to produce a substantial upgrade. Either increase your budget or don't bother upgrading.

So moving from the Ivybridge Pentium to the Ivybridge i5 wouldn't make that much of a difference?

With overclocking you could potentially see up to a 50% boost with a 3570K at 4.2GHz. However I don't think it's worth all that money for that kind of upgrade on an old dead end platform. For a little bit more you could get a haswell cpu and motherboard which would be dramatically faster. If you wait you might even be able to upgrade to broadwell instead when it comes out.