Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Greetings again,

A couple years back I bought a Sapphire HD7750 for a Dell Small form factor to use instead of integrated GPU. Back in the day my processor wasn't powerful enough so I didn't use Dolphin heavily (if at all). Since I am now going to buy a new CPU, Motherboard, etc. could I cannibalize the old system and use this GPU instead of buying a new one? I'm just trying to keep my costs down on the new system. Here are the specs:

GPU
800 MHz Core Clock
28 nm Chip
512 x Stream Processors

Video Memory
1024 MB Size
128 -bit GDDR5
4500 MHz Effective

Should I buy a more powerful one or combined with an OC g3258 Pentium would it work well, very well, excellent, etc.? Thanks.

I'm using a Sapphire R7 250 which is very similar to the HD 7750 with the 7750 being slightly more powerful, and I also have a G3258.

And my advice would depend on what games you want to run AND what OS you're going to use.

I'm happy with my computers performance, I can run most Wii games, the only one that doesn’t run perfectly so far (that I've tested) is Mario Galaxy.
But I suspect it's more of a driver issue and not that the card isn't powerful enough.

Aside from that I've run many games on it at 60/30fps with 2x-3x IR
Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country Returns, NSMBW, Kirby's Epic Yarn and a lot more.

The reason I mention OS is because on linux ATI drivers leave a bit to be desired BUT they are improving fairly quickly in recent years.
Also there is a bug atm where fglrx (ATI proprietary drivers) conflict with Wine so you can't install both right now without some pretty heavy fixes.

Apart from that though, I imagine the HD7750 is more than enough for 95% of games, it also handles native games admirably.

The G3258 is a great CPU, really lending itself well to the 99% programs that only use single or duel core, because you can get a per core clock speed comparable to some of the high end CPUs.
If I were to build another emulation machine I would go with it again, however I'd upgrade my GPU to something like a gtx 750ti. I had to go with the R7250 because it's the most powerful GPU that fits in my case.

Mines running at 4ghz atm, but I've fun it at just 3.8ghz for months and still played all the games I mentioned.
I even ran it at stock for a while and it still handled all the games at 2x with a little slow down occasionally.

If there are any more specific question about this setup just let me know and I'll see if I can help.