DOLPHIN EMULATION: i3 6100/6320 vs i5 6500 IPC

[misinformedman]

Hey, I'm building an PC that will be specifically used ONLY for emulation of Dolphin in 1440p it is literally a single use PC, and will never be used for any other games of any kind, ever.

I've heard that Dolphin only uses 2 threads (possibly 3 if you offload sound to its own thread?) and benefits from cpus with high IPC, though I've also heard cache is important too?

With that in mind, would it make more sense to buy an i3 at 3.7-3.9 ghz or an i5 with 3.2 ghz/3.6ghz turbo? believe the i5 has more cache, and I can offload the sound onto another physical core? Which cpu performs better in a single/dual threaded environment like Dolphin? Do you think the i5, even though it's 100-300mhz slower will perform better in Dolphin specifically?

I would be pairing either cpu with 2133 mhz ram (unless someone can find me a $60 micro-atx mobo that supports higher), an SSD and a gtx 1060 3gb.

I will literally never use this to boot any other games or applications. Only Dolphin, and I want the best experience with the least stutter and smoothest framerate. Thoughts?

Thanks in advance!

(P.S. with the components I have, $210 is the top of my budget for the CPU, $60 for the motherboard. Obviously a more expensive cpu with overclocking would dramatically outperform both, but the rest of my budget doesn't permit such extravagance for a single use system)

 

[sarwar_r87]

They have the same IPC. Or instruction per CYCLE.

But i3 rubs at a higher clock, so if dual thread is all you need, it will be okay. I3 has hyperthreading so you can still off load other tasks.

But, having said that a a computer runs 1000 threads at a time even when you running one app.

 

[synphul]

According to these performance results from folks running dolphin 5.0 the i3 6100 @ 3.7ghz (stock) is just slightly faster than the 6500 @ 3.5ghz. It also appeared to use slightly faster ram, ddr4 2666 vs ddr4 2400 with the i5 6500.

i3 6100 - 6 minutes.
i5 6500 - 6 minutes 17 seconds.

The chart came from overclock.net from this thread.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1604403/dolphin-5-0-cpu-benchmark-results-automatically-updated/10

There's an i3 6100 near the top of that chart though if you scroll along the various info fields you'll see it's because someone overclocked it to around 5ghz.

 

[Filipe_6]

I had build a pc just for emulation (dolphin and cemu), my setup was the pentium 3258 at 4.2/4.5 it can run all the games full speed, its the best cpu for that as it saves you money and equal OC i7 in performance.