So I've used Dolphin for a while with no real performance issues at all, but I'm curious where my specs fall on the spectrum--mainly, how good are my CPU and GPU for Dolphin, which is more likely to be a bottleneck, and maybe, if I wanted to squeeze just a little more performance out of Dolphin, what my options are. I don't feel like copy-pasting my specs here, they're all on my profile.
You have fairly high end specs for Dolphin. Unless you want 4x IR + AA in games, CPU will always be bottleneck.
Yes, the CPU is usually what bottlenecks you in Dolphin. The GPU is used for making the game look nicer by increasing IR/AA/AF.
Using either Intel XTU or ThrottleStop can help keep you in max turbo mode to try and eliminate and CPU lag
I have the same CPU in my laptop and got the GT740M and I play everything full speed internal res 2.5
I use Intel XTU to undervolt my cpu -90mv offset
( runs around 5 degress less, set my multipliers to 32x to achieve 3.2GHZ constant on all cores)
not that it matters since dolphin uses 2 cores but it helps keeping my cpu nice and cool
but yea cpu is the bottleneck but hey look at it on the brightside you can play withouth any problems