Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

So just yesterday I began discovering the world of dolphin, but without knowing how powerful compared to today's spec is the laptop my brother borrows me I decided to go straight looking for low end setting and how to make the games run fast rather than pretty.
First up, I'm using Ishiiruka Dolphin 743 (9c8d5e5) (Allow me to know if I need to type the super long revision code) and I've tried to set up for the fastest settings with only minor improvements. When I tested the latest build of Dolphin it ran at about 7-8 fps, but with Ishiiruka it stabilizes at 18-22 fps but with constant horrible fps drops (as if it wasn't enough).

I decided to check the laptop's specs and here they are (Note that this is the exact same I typed in my profile):

Operating System: WIndows 10 64 bit
Processor/CPU: Intel Core i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00 Ghz
Video Card/GPU: AMD FirePro M5950
Memory/RAM: 8.00 Gb

Then, just moments ago, I was reading on about CPU bottlenecking and dolphin, but all info I could get was to check if dual core processing was enabled (of course I have it enabled), but out of curiosity I decided to check task manager's resources consumption (I don;t really know how to call this) while running a game, and it showed that dolphin was using only about 16-18% of cpu.
It was then when I had opened settings and was just looking around the configuration I had when the game's sound suddenly began sounding smoothly, I closed settings and went to the game and to my surprise, for the first time it was running smoothly at 60 fps and everything seemed to be running perfectly, I inmediatly checked task manager and it showed that about 88% of cpu was being used (in total, didn't check dolphin specifically because I switched back to the game fast). But it only lasted about 10-20 seconds, and then it went back to "normal", 20 fps and low cpu usage.

In no way I'm a computer expert but I really want to know what gives, since the computer seems clearly capable of running dolphin without many problems.
Is there war to derive more cpu power to dolphin? Tried right clicking dolphin's process to see if I can give it more priority, like older versions of task manager, but it seems this no longer is an option on windows 10. Help will be appreciated and sorry if I over extended on maybe a simple problem.

Well, there are a couple of things to consider here.
First, it would be great to know what games you were trying to play where this happened in. Some games are more demanding than others.

Second, your CPU is not very fast. You should be able to play the majority of lightweight and medium games, and maybe some of the heavier games.

Third, what version of Dolphin were you using? if you were using 5.0 stable, try one of the latest dev builds. If you're already using a dev build, check to see if it's the latest one.

Fourth, laptops are known to throttle when they get too hot unless you have a good computer. It sounds like you may have one that is built as a workstation so it may be ok. What you can do to prevent issues is to open up the bottom of the computer and get a can of compressed air and blow all the dust out of the vents. Old computers have buildup of dust in the fans over time, so this should help. You can also go a step further and replace the thermal paste on the CPU/GPU if you know what you're doing.

Fifth, make sure in Windows Power Management you're running in High performance mode. ALso check to make sure you have the latest drivers for your GPU and that it has a high performance profile for Dolphin.

As it turns out, I'm pretty dumb. Sorry for taking so longo to reply but HP Power assistant had disabled my wlan. Anyway, yes, the answer was the power plan. As it turns out it was on power saving and as soon as I flipped the high perfomance switch it began running the game (Pokemon Battle Revolution, for clarification) perfectly.

Thank you for your time and I hope my thread serves of use to other careless users like me that don;t even check that kind of stuff.

It's an easy mistake to make and not all that obvious. These power managers tend to automate things for common programs, so, it's not really your fault that it's not kicking into high power; it's the driver/laptop manufacturer for their power management stuff.