Hey,
I'm buying a laptop, mainly for school and travel, so it needs to be very portable.
I'm deciding between a i5-6200 (2.3-2.8 ghz, 2cores) + gtx 940mx or i7-6500U (2.5-3.1 ghz, 2cores) + 940m.
Would the i5 be fast enough for gamecube games in full speed or should I choose the i7.
cores don't matter beyond two. Clock speed, instructions per cycle, and how much it's going to throttle matters.
Since that's a Skylake CPU, you're fine on cores, Clock speed, and IPC.
What will probably kill you is throttling. I've only seen a few systems that have cooling reasonable for ULV chips to not throttle. If a system packs a ULV chip, 9 times out of 10 it barely has a heatsink or fan. Which, for most users is fine, they don't care about throttling and don't need even half decent cooling on a ULV. For Dolphin, throttling matters.
I can get crazy speeds in some games while others hardly sustain it in certain points.
Sonic Heroes for Gamecube is one of those games that likes to get slowdowns,at least on the Vulkan backend.
Anyone run into issues/regressions again (like flickering frames) with the most recent game ready driver update?
I have a 5200U.
I didn't test all my games yet but for now the only game that have slowdowns is F-Zero GX.
I think my work laptop has a Broadwell ULV. Worked fine in Dolphin for the most part when I gave it a spin. It also actually has a fan and heatsink, which is nice.
One of my laptops has a haswell ULV, but is one of those ultra thin "ultrabooks", barely has any sort of fan, relies on the aluminum chassis to get rid of heat. And what do you know, lags like hell in Dolphin.
Thanks for the fast replies.
I got the lenovo yoga 710, with the i7-6500u and 940mx.
It didn't throttle in furmark tests and with slight undervolting I think it will be fairly steady at 2.5-2.7 ghz.
So (thanks to your replies) I'm fairly confident now that the processor will be sufficient enough.