Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

I've been using a Haswell Intel NUC as a small, passively cooled Emulation machine. However, I'd now add Wii and GQ emulation to the mix and I guess that my existing hardware just doesn't cut it anymore.

The NUC comes with a Intel Core i3-4010U @ 1.70GHz (Passmark scores), 8GB of RAM and an Intel HD Graphics 4400.

My goal would be to be able to run the following titles in 720p or preferably 1080p and without slowdowns:

• New Super Mario Bros.
  
• Donkey Kong Country Returns
  
• TLoZ: The Wind Waker
  
• Metroid Prime 1 & 2
  
• Star Fox Adventures
  
• Super Mario Sunshine
  
• Super Mario Galaxy
  

What kind of (small & quiet) system would I need as a baseline?

Any recommendations on one of the newer i3 or i5 NUCs? Or how about a small mini-itx system with the new low-TPD AMD Ryzen 5 2400GE chips?

With those clockspeeds on the i3-4010U I'm not surprised you're having issues.

Do you have a budget? Cause you could get either a Skull Canyon NUC (i7-6770HQ + Iris Pro 580 iGPU) or a Hades Canyon NUC (8th gen i7 + Vega M GPU), but they're kinda expensive. It would be cheaper to make a mini-itx build tho and customize all your parts.

How about those new Bean Canyon NUCs?

Those look like they should do alright. Unlike a lot of other ULV CPUs, these ones have a high base clock and a decent power draw. I'd go with either the 8109U just for the base clock alone. When thermal throttling is a big factor, you'd want to have a good minimum clock. Any turbo boost after that is a bonus. I haven't touched Metroid Prime 1 or 2 in a while, so you still might have speed issues there, I dunno how they've changed in Dolphin recently.

The question is, do You really need those very small factor cans. They are usually equipped with laptop cpus, any high clocked models are absurdly high cost. If i would buy small factor machine, i would go for two options:
- Mini ITX system with integrated GPU - it would be intel (kabylake/kabylake R/coffee lake) or ryzen. The problem is that mini-itx motherboards are expensive. If you can get one with bargain, then it would be base for nice system with desktop CPU. Not really have to mention that it have much more computational power that any NUC
- Micro -ATX System, which would have space for dedicated card. People reccomend even used 750Ti, but 960gtx or 1050/ti would be even better cause newer architecture. So, in addition to above, you would have nice PC gaming system.

Still, both systems generally costs same as NUC with all base components, but still giving better performance cause equipped with desktop parts. If you can accomodate more space and dont care of slighty more power usage then go for one of the options above. I didnt mention all model parts because it all depends on how much money you would throw on that.

I've also considered the new 35W TDP version of the Ryzen 5 2400GE or Ryzen 3 2200GE which both use a base clock speed of 3,2GHz:

https://www.quietpc.com/amd-2nd-gen-ryzen-cpus

Am right the Dolphin wouldn't be able to use the additional threads and GPU cores anyway and the 2200GE would be enough in that case?

Look at youtube for ryzen APU performance with Dolphin / PCSX2 / Citra, etc. They seem satisfactory for those emulators, but not for something like CEMU. Nothing like seeing their performance for yourself, just be sure you get good dual-channel memory with those APUs.