Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Hey guys,

Currently waiting for a few new components. I have on its way a Phenom II 550 Black Edition and a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H Motherboard. Im aware the motherboard only supports DDR2. But I was on a really tight budget and wanted something that not only gave me a good bang for my buck but also (as I like to tinker) something to play with in terms of overclocking/unlocking.

I did alot of reading up and apparently this motherboard has succesfuly unlocked the 2 extra cores on alot of 550's as it supports ACC. So for me it was a winner.

Wont be getting a new GPU for another few weeks yet. Or atleast until ive sold my 8800GT, AMD 6000+ and MSI motherboard im currently using. Im also grabbing another 2gb stick of DDR2 6400 ram as i have 2Gb already.

Im fairly clued up with PC's as I used to build alot as part of my business but have been out of the loop for a few years now.

I really just wanted a few opinions on what kind of performance increase I will see over my 6000+ on dolphin seeing as its far more reliant on the CPU. Ive read up on benchmarking and such. But still leaves me no idea on what this will run dolphin like for me?

Any opinions would be great

Your max performance increase should be somewhere between 30-80%. We don't have a lot of hard data yet so I can't really give you anything more precise than that. But I will say that with your new cpu their really is nothing else you need to upgrade. An 8800GT is more than sufficient, 2GB of ram is plenty, dolphin only uses 2 cores anyways so that cpu is excellent even without unlocking the other 2 cores, and dolphin has no benefit from using DDR3 ram, since it's not bottlenecked by memory bandwidth. So as far as dolphin is concerned your right where you want to be .

Thanks for the reply NV. Really appreciate that

Cant wait to get some more juice for running dolphin. I play alot of PC games too. And the 8800GT is a beast of a card, but will still probably upgrade it.

So overall not a bad little upgrade for a measley £150


Thanks again