My AMD 6300 is not doing well in dolphin. i'm considering building a mini pc just to run dolphin using the G3258. I want to know how would this perform in games such as Brawl, xenobales chronicles, and mario kart? My gpu is the 670ftw.
G3258 should have no problem with any of those games. However on your profile it states you are using Dolphin 3.5 which is very old and glitchy. Switch to the latest dev builds and try that out first.
Just overclock it , G3258 doesn't need an aftermarket cooler to do that
Pair it with Asrock or Msi B85 itx then overclock it
As long as you don't cross the limit 1.35V , the CPU should last more than 10 years
I have one, and was able overclocked it to 4.2 GHz right out of the package with default settings with no overheat or stability issues whatsoever. I haven't felt the need to push it further as this seems to be a natural limit speed beyond which stability becomes and issue and more aggressive over-volting and cooling become necessary.
When I ran the dolphin benchmark
here, my system scored 7:48 which you can see is very respectable compared to the i7k's in
this list.
As far as in-game performance in dolphin, it is probably as good as all but the very high end i7 processors out on the market now. It runs MKW rock solid during races with significant slow-downs in some of the character/track selection screens, especially when running local multiplayer. SSMB runs a smooth 60FPS as well, except on the intro video where it stutters a bit. I don't have Xenoblade so I don't know how well it would perform there.
You can't go wrong with this processor from a price/performance ratio.
Based on the most recent Dolphin benchmark, the G3258 at its stock clock speed runs Dolphin better than my i7 with full turbo thanks to Throttlestop.
For reference, I can run the games you listed perfectly, along with some other games that are a little bit more demanding. Since you have a much better GPU than me, you'll be able to run them at higher resolutions than me as well, so not only will they run smooth, they'll look nice too.
If you've got the money for a new CPU and mobo, I'd go for it. The Pentium is dirt cheap anyway and a good mobo to slap that sucker into won't run you much either. It will put your FX to shame when it comes to Dolphin and most games and anything else that only runs on 1 or 2 cores.