Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hello.
Hopefully, I'm in the right section if not moderators can move the Topic  
So finally I managed to buy the  RTX 2060 for a reasonable price! Originally I was planning to buy the 3060 but am more than happy to get this one.
So..... Now I need some help with the other components to build a system around the 3070ti
I'm thinking of a Ryzen 9 3900X (https://productz.com/en/amd-ryzen-9-3900x/p/eR057), 16GB 3600Mhz RGB Ram at the core but I haven't built a PC for a loooong time so I'm after advice on the best match components to this GPU if possible, please?
Thanks for any pointers

For emulation, single-thread performance is king. So your best choice is either 12gen Intel of ideally an i3 or higher or, hypothetically, the Ryzen 5800X3D (which seems to help emulators for newer systems more-so than it does Dolphin) or, as a "plan B", non-X3D non-G Ryzen 5000 of the 5600 or higher.

"moar corez!" only helps emulation if dealing with consoles that originally had multiple cores of their own, e.g. the PS3 and Xbox 360... but even that only helps up to a point, and 12 cores is past that point unless you wanted to also do CPU-encoded streaming (which I would advise against since you have an RTX 2060 which has a very good hardware video encoder).

It is worth mentioning though that AMD's AM4 platform is basically end-of-life and they're almost certainly going to be at least previewing if not straight-up announcing Ryzen 7000 on AM5 in literally, not figuratively, a couple of days at their Computex keynote (motherboard manufacturers are already showing teasers of their AM5 motherboards). UPDATE: Yup, Ryzen 7000 + AM5 socket was indeed previewed for an autumn launch later this year.

Also RAM is pretty cheap right now so honestly I'd just go straight to 2x16GB and just not worry about it going forwards, especially if you want to try doing emulation of newer consoles where RAM capacity starts to matter more.


The rest of the components won't matter particularly much in terms of performance (unless you use a case with no airflow), and the likes of a motherboard and storage tends to be a lot more up to personal preference (assuming it's not a motherboard that has such trash VRMs that the CPU throttles under load), especially since manual CPU overclocking doesn't even makes all that much sense anymore on modern CPUs.

That being said, nobody should ever skimp on a power supply and, historically, common advice was to not "overbuy" the wattage but a certain blue CPU company and a certain green GPU company seem to be a bit overly eager on throwing power efficiency to the wind, so leaving yourself with some extra wattage headroom may not be unwise.


Oh and protip, PcPartPicker is your friend (click the flag in the top-right to select your correct region for local shops and pricing):

• https://pcpartpicker.com