Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

It's time to upgrade my seven year old PC, but after browsing through this area I'm still not sure what hardware to buy that will run Dolphin without any problems.

I tend to favor Asus motherboards with an Intel CPU - not too worried about graphics hardware (AMD, Nvidia, etc) as long as it does the job. However, in the past I've preferred AMD.

So, going by the above criteria, what Asus motherboard range, Intel CPU and graphics card should I go for?

(I'm assuming that any Asus motherboard with built-in graphics hardware won't be up to the task in the graphics department).


I don't want to spend vast amounts of money, just enough to run Dolphin without any issues (the capability of running Wii games in HD would be a nice bonus, but not essential).

If You don't need i5/i7 then wait a little for Core i3-7350K tests ... 2 cores, 4 threads and unlocked multiplier (overclock) might be good in reasonable price ...

My rig runs mostly fine. You would still run into dolphin problems.
Twilight princess hyrule field I'm managing mostly 30 without speedhack.
1080° Snowboarding needs interpreter soo good luck.
Dolphin still has shader compilation stuttering.

Get yourself any reasonably clocked Skylake chip with at least 2 physical cores and Dolphin will run fine.


As for your GPU, It doesn't matter what you pick now that Vulkan runs well on AMD. Due to most of the regular dolphin devs being on nvidia and Intel, I would still recommend nvidia.

Asus motherboards is very good, I also use it