Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

The way I see it, I have three options.

1. Continue playing them on my modded Wii without HD graphics.
   
2. Buy a WiiU and softmod it so I can have HD graphics.
   
3. Buy a new PC to run Dolphin and play it at 1080p 60fps
   

What would be the best way? I've stopped myself from playing because I want to enjoy the games with nicer graphics. But, I don't want to have to deal with a lot of lag and audio slow downs.

I've been considering buying a used Dell/Hp computer and throwing a better graphics card in it. One computer in particular is the Dell Optiplex 7010 with a I5 3470 @ 3.4ghz. If I do buy it, i'll plan to throw in a GTX 1050 ti and 16gb of ram. Would this computer be enough to play the Metroid Trilogy smoothly at 1080p 60fps?

You can rule out the second option, because a Wii U can't run Wii games at a higher resolution than a Wii. The only real advantage of a Wii U when it comes to playing Wii discs is the HDMI output.

Given the cost of RAM I'd probably stick with 8gb if that's the kind of system you're speccing and put that money towards a better gpu - all you'd have to do is make sure you don't have your internet browser, media player, photo editor, file transfer, basket-weaving simulator, etc. all running while you're trying to game and 8gb will be fine...

Also you can really easily find optiplex's with 4570 and sometimes slightly better in the same price range since a lot of Haswell office equipment has hit the market recently and the prices dropped quite a bit. So for nothing more then some extra time looking you might get a 5% increase in overall performance.

Definitely drop 8 or those 16GB from your plan. I don't know why everyone thinks they need 16GB of RAM, especially consider how expensive it is lately. When it comes to Dolphin especially, 16GB is a complete waste.

Unless you prefetch high resolution texture packs, or if you're running a lot of other programs when not using Dolphin, or you open a single tab in Chrome, etc