Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Greetings!

I have been rummaging through a bunch of old hardware that i've been replacing from my family's computers over the years and my workplace's e-waste and i came across some decent stuff that i could use to build an htpc/emulation machine for literally almost free, my main concern is which one of these processors would yield the best performance mainly in gamecube games, i already have one that has an AMD phenom II 955 that performs great but if i have the chance to use something that will draw less power, perform better and run cooler i'll definitely take it (will use a very old revision r7559):

AMD Phenom II 955 BE (The processor i'm currently using, works great at full speed in what i tested so far)
Core 2 Quad q8400 (According to cpu-world this one should have 6% better single threaded performance than the Phenom 955)
Core 2 Quad q9550 (15% better single thread performance)
Core 2 Duo e8600 (I do't have this one but i can buy one for very cheap from a hardware recycling company near me. Supposedly this one should have 35% better single thread performance than the q8400 but it seems a bit exaggerated, i expected better ipc but not THAT much, if that's the case i'm definitely picking it up)

I'm concerned that windows 10 might run a little crappy on the core 2 duo, in that case i'd just instal linux but i definitely prefer to have windows on it since i won't be the only one who's gonna use it and i'd rather not install windows 7 which is old and unsupported at this point although i could go for windows 8.1 and install some start menu mod)

I happen to also own a backwards compatible WII which looks pretty good through component but a higher resolution on pc hooked up through HDMI looks better (4k displays have nothing but disadvantages for retro junkies like me) and i appreciate having to manage less cables. This computer is going to be in the living room, i have my main workstation in my room and i'm not always going to play on it, plus i built it mostly for work.

Of course the best idea would be to use the q9550 since it would be free but that core 2 duo's performance on paper really surprised me, of course there's more to performance than just these estimate numbers but in the end i might probably buy it later on, test all three processors and upload the results somewhere.

Thank you in advance for reading!

Honestly, for Dolphin, none of them are really good choices. Dolphin is primarily a single core program so it relies on single threaded performance (the combination of instructions per clock and frequency). The single threaded performaance increase from a Core 2 Duo to now is enormous. Passmark, a historical but important bench since it goes waaaaay back, has the core 2 duo and modern processors. A Core 2 Duo e6600 (a CPU I have owned) has a single thread score of 948 there. The Ryzen 5900x has a score of 3381. Dolphin isn't necessarily their workload, but you can roughly expect three times the performance in Dolphin on the 5600x. Yea, that's a lot.

Dolphin is faster compared to then, but let me tell you, Dolphin on my old Core 2 Duo was work. With a hearty overclock it was baaarely able to maintain fullspeed in most games and could even handle some hard games too. But other games, like The Last Story and Metroid Prime 3 were just out of reach.

For Dolphin use, I do not recommend any oof these. Even a latest gen Core i3 would give you many times the performance at a fraction of the power use. I definitely do not recommend spending money for these if Dolphin is your goal, get something like a used coffee lake processor instead and you'll get far, far more performance for Dolphin. But if it is just ewaste and you are preventing them from ending up in the bin, there is still a lot of use to be had from them. Just, temper your expectations of Dolphin performance.

I know these are old, i explained i won't be buying any of these but they're instead a bunch of stuff i found, i already have my main build with an i7-9700kf but i won't be bringing that to the living room and i won't be using any of those old chips for anything other than watching netflix and the occasional mario kart or mario strikers on dolphin, i already have been using the phenom 955 for that purpose and it works just fine with that old dolphin build i mentioned (r7559) just thought i might replace it with the q9550 that i found. I won't be buying the core 2 duo then, i considered it just for sh*ts and giggles since it is literally dirt cheap close to my place but it would make no sense to have more e-waste lying around. Maybe i'll just get extra GC controllers for my wii and use that instead lol

Yes these are very old chips, as explained i won't be using them for anything other than watching netflix and the occasional mario kart or mario strikers which are not super demanding games that i acutally used to run on an old amd fx chip with a much weaker ipc, for any serious gaming i have my personal workstation which has an i7-9700kf but i'm not bringing that to the living room. I though of buying the core 2 duo just for sh*ts and giggles since it is literally dirt cheap but it makes no sense to have more e-waste laying around and the whole point was just recycling. I'll keep using the phenom i mentioned since i've already been using it for that purpose and it has been working just fine, just wanted to know if someone had some experience with any of those chips i mentioned. If i ever find the time i'll test the q9550 which i also found the socket 775 motherboard which was used with that chip and still works, just some new thermal paste, a nice isopropyl alcohol shower and a new cmos battery is all it needs. Maybe i could also get extra GC controllers for my WII instead.

If you already have a strong computer to run Dolphin, and if you have an Ethernet connection or strong wifi between the two rooms, is to stream Dolphin using Steam In Home streaming or something similar

I'm a bit late to this thread, but as a Haswell Pentium user, low-end Intel 4th gen "Haswell" chips, particularly those that are not Celerons (because those have substantially reduced cache), are probably the best sweet spot between "old" and "good performance".

This is largely because, for reasons still somewhat unknown to this day, Haswell provided a substantial jump in per-clock emulation performance (like 20%-30%) over Ivy Bridge despite only being 5%-10% better per-clock than Ivy Bridge in basically all other workloads.


EDIT: ...Pentium G3258 CPUs, you know, the model with an unlocked multiplier, go for a as low as $15 USD nowadays on ebay (there are in fact currently 3 open listings under $15 USD on ebay, one of which has 2 CPUs available so therefore 4 CPUs available in total for under $15 USD). I know that modern games and Windows OSes really like having more than 2 CPU threads (though our very own wiki caretacker mbc07 is running Windows 10 on a G3258, so what do I know?), but that just feels like a steal to me specifically for Dolphin use - especially if you go the Linux route or specifically make it a more retro-focused PC running Windows 7 or the like.

EDIT 2: And of course, the G3258 also was commonly able to be overclocked even on non-z motherboards... though it apparently doesn't work correctly specifically on Windows 10.

In my opinion,my AMD Sempron 140 is better than those processors (The intel equivalent is a Pentium E5400 btw). Maybe i am wrong,or maybe not,who knows... I would recommend something from like 2013-2015 or something newer 

Get a Intel Pentium E5400 (or a AMD Sempron 140,or something between 2013-2015)

Haswell chips are still pretty capable today (those celerons were awful though even back then), i used to have a pentium g3220 years ago and it ran dolphin at full speed (at least the stuff that i wanted to play), then again i didn't really play any of the intense stuff on that particular chip anyways. In the end i actually got a core 2 quad q9400 for free from a store that was throwing away an old lenovo station, i didn't do anything with it yet but when i get some time i'll clean it up and get either debian or ubuntu on it since windows 10 seems to act up on those particular g40/h40 chipsets and windows 11 is of course not even an option. I do have an i3 2120 but i don't have a compatible motherboard anymore and 2nd gen boards are notorious for their crappy components so i'm not even gonna try to find one unless it's something cheap to fix like a corrupt bios or something. Windows 7 has the issue with the dts certificate that expired last week and though it is easy to fix i'd rather save myself some maintenance, plus i don't like running older graphics drivers so i'll go with linux for this.

BTW back in the day i used windows 8 up untill 10 came out and emulation worked a lot better than it did on windows 7 (probably because i was running an amd fx chip on that one system and support for those was limited on 7), maybe 8.1 should replace 7 for lower end systems since it is at least still supported.

Though none of this fixes the fact that i'm still left with a bunch of e-waste lol maybe it would be a good idea to donate it but some of it is so old.