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Xeon Upgrade Question - Printable Version

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Xeon Upgrade Question - AwesomeMarioFan - 12-15-2016

Hello,

I have the opportunity to upgrade my current system, I was looking to get your opinion on how well it would run Dolphin when upgraded:
Current Specs:
- 2x Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40Ghz (Turbo ~2.6Ghz)
- Nvidia GeForce GT 315 (Yes, this is pretty old haha, still works at 1x resolution though in most cases)
- 4GB RAM

Upgraded Specs:
- 2x Intel Xeon X5687 @ 3.6Ghz (Turbo ~3.9Ghz)
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 645
- 16GB RAM


Currently it runs most GameCube games that I tested very well, however with Wii games it bottlenecks. I also had a separate question, would an i7-2600 be better for Dolphin than the 2x X5687 Xeons?

Thanks in advance,
John

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - Helios - 12-15-2016

You can throw 40 haswell cores at Dolphin, and it would run roughly as fast as a dual core G3258 at the same clock speed.

Dolphin in it's default config uses 2 hard working threads. One for CPU emulation, one for GPU. Or you can turn that off and run 1 thread, which fixes some bugs but is significantly slower.

Dolphin cares about very high single threaded performance. You're running a Westmere CPU. That is almost 7 years old now. That's only a little bit faster than the performance of high end AMD chips (lmao I know)

Build yourself a Skylake or Kaby Lake whenever the heck that comes out, and Dolphin will run fine.

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - admin89 - 12-15-2016

Yeah, an i3 haswell like i3-4130 @ 3.40GHz can easily kill any old Sandy Bridge i7/Xeon in Dolphin .
Unless you buy i7 2600k or i7 3770k with Z77 mobo and overclock it to 4.5GHz , demanding games won't run well . The latest i3 6100 @ 3.7GHz is still better than an OCed i7 2600k though

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - AwesomeMarioFan - 12-16-2016

Thanks for your input! Since that doesn't seem like it would work well then, would building a budget PC with an Intel Pentium G3258/G4400/G4500 work good? (I'm leaning more towards the G3258 w/ OC to ~4.5Ghz) They are newer architectures and seem to run Dolphin pretty well from what I've been researching. If so, which one would you recommend?

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - Helios - 12-16-2016

The answer to this depends. Are you building a desktop? Or are you building an emulation system? If you're building a desktop, I recommend waiting until Intel releases their Kaby Lake i3 that has an unlocked multiplier so you can overclock that if you need to, which you probably won't. If you're just building and emulation system, the G3258 is fine. Just overclock it.

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - AwesomeMarioFan - 12-16-2016

(12-16-2016, 02:46 PM)Helios Wrote: The answer to this depends. Are you building a desktop? Or are you building an emulation system? If you're building a desktop, I recommend waiting until Intel releases their Kaby Lake i3 that has an unlocked multiplier so you can overclock that if you need to, which you probably won't. If you're just building and emulation system, the G3258 is fine. Just overclock it.

Thanks for your response - Yes, I am referring to a desktop computer. I'm looking to use it mostly for Dolphin/basic tasks. (Web browsing, office, etc.) For tasks which require more CPU cores like video encoding or virtualization I was going to use the Xeon server, which is the reason why I am looking to build a budget computer.

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - Helios - 12-17-2016

Get a kaby lake i3 if you're willing to wait.

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - AwesomeMarioFan - 12-18-2016

Hey,

I'm looking to purchase these components in the next few days - so I'm down to either the G3258 or an E3-1220v3/1230v3 (Reason being for the E3 is that I can skip upgrading my old Xeon workstation and use this new PC for both Dolphin and highly threaded tasks). However, I'm not sure how good the performance with the 1220v3 is with Dolphin, but I did see that it is Haswell.

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - admin89 - 12-18-2016

These CPUs should be fine with Dolphin
Opt for the E3 1230V3 if you find it at reasonable price , it's basically an i7 4770 on stedroid. E3 1220V3 is fine but it's 30->50% slower in video encoding tasks since it does not have HT

RE: Xeon Upgrade Question - AwesomeMarioFan - 12-20-2016

Will the E3-1231V3 (Found a decent price on it) be identical to performance of the G3258 overclocked even in intensive games such as Super Mario Galaxy then? I may end up going with the Xeon in this case because of the extra cores.