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Forums - PC Discussion - I'm building a PC for the first time. how does it hold up? (PC Gamers only)

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Now im trying to build a decent PC for a low price. it has to atleast play most current PC games, and if there any experts in emulation, can my rig play Dolphin games at full speed? I have the original Wii and Gamecube games, and consoles so using dolphin is not illegal for me, incase you were wondering. I just want to see my Favorite Wii games in HD with better anti-aliasing etc.

I will be using an Intel Core i3-3220 @ 3.30GHz for my CPU, and a Radeon HD 6670 for a graphics card along with 8GB of DDR3 RAM (4 Gigs per stick)

so how does these specks hold up? to weak? decent? any suggestions would be welcome :)

 



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If you only want to play Wii/GC games on Dolphin, that's probably fine, altough I would recommend getting a higher clocked i3 like the 3245. If you want to play some new games, though, get a better GPU. The 6670 won't cut it for next-gen.



Generally speaking to get the largest amount of games you need a CPU at around 3.6 ghz (over clocked is the best way to get there economically, 4.0 is ideal) Your CPU will still play a large amount of games, especially ps2 emulators, wii games tend to be more demanding but it varies game by game. 

For emulators, the part that has the effect of antialiasing is the internal resolution. At 1080p 3x plus is desirable. But obviously anything over 1x will look better. This is mostly affected by the gpu. Your gpu is a bit weak but should play the games well enough. Better gpus will give u better results. Next gen games will run sluggish for sure.

What is your budget? And do u only want to run emulators and play most games on console? If u have the exact components and prices I can help tweak ur build without increasing costs that much (I believe)



RazorDragon said:
If you only want to play Wii/GC games on Dolphin, that's probably fine, altough I would recommend getting a higher clocked i3 like the 3245. If you want to play some new games, though, get a better GPU. The 6670 won't cut it for next-gen.

Ok, but it will be good for Skyrim and the likes, right? cause I've got so many PC games to play I don't think ill be playing any next gen games for awhile lol, and Im somewhat unimployed (im 16, don't have time for job) so the parts im getting now pretty much has my budget maxed out.



ishiki said:
Generally speaking to get the largest amount of games you need a CPU at around 4.0 ghz (over clocked is the best way to get there economically, 3.6 ghz). Your CPU will still play a large amount of games, especially ps2 emulators wii games tend to be more demanding but it varies game by game.

For emulators, the part that has the effect of antialiasing is the internal resolution. At 1080p 3x plus is desirable. But obviously anything over 1x will look better. This is mostly affected by the gpu. Your gpu is a bit weak but should play the games well enough. Better gpus will give u better results. Next gen games will run sluggish for sure.

What is your budget? And do u only want to run emulators and play most games on console? If u have the exact components and prices I can help tweak ur build without increasing costs that much (I believe)

my budget is about $350, but my brother is helping me by paying for Shipping and Taxes, so don't count shipping and stuff into the total cost. I already have the tons of harddrives, and I got a decent chassis/case that will work, and a Very good Disk Drive. All I need pretty much is a PSU, RAM, GPU, CPU, and MotherBoard. running dolphin games is a high priority, as long as I can run the most taxing Wii games at full speed or near it, then thats awesome, exactly what im going for. and if by "Next Gen" games you mean whats coming out on PS4/Xbox One, I don't really care to much right now, current gen games like skyrim, minecraft, and TF2 will keep me busy for awhile, and ill upgrade my GPU later.



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the-pi-guy said:
It depends what settings and frame rate you want to play at. More information needed.

well as long as it looks good, and not all choppy. like if some Wii games ran at 60 fps, but I need to tune it down to 30 fps to run on my hardware, then thats fine. the resoloution needs to be at atleast 720p

for PC games, its not really that high of a priority, but medium to low settings will be fine.



OneHappyGamer:) said:
RazorDragon said:
If you only want to play Wii/GC games on Dolphin, that's probably fine, altough I would recommend getting a higher clocked i3 like the 3245. If you want to play some new games, though, get a better GPU. The 6670 won't cut it for next-gen.

Ok, but it will be good for Skyrim and the likes, right? cause I've got so many PC games to play I don't think ill be playing any next gen games for awhile lol, and Im somewhat unimployed (im 16, don't have time for job) so the parts im getting now pretty much has my budget maxed out.


It'll play Skyrim and every game released till now, but don't expect to play them at high settings. Next-gen, though, requirements are likely to go up and I don't believe you would be able to play the new games at a reasonable performance. Since your main priority is Dolphin, that PC will work just fine and probably play every game at 60FPS, since the GPU is much less important than the CPU in this case. You could probably get a better GPU by going with a AMD setup and play PC games at higher settings, but, at least for Dolphin, your performance is going to go down if you get an AMD processor, at least compared to that i3.



RazorDragon said:
OneHappyGamer:) said:
RazorDragon said:
If you only want to play Wii/GC games on Dolphin, that's probably fine, altough I would recommend getting a higher clocked i3 like the 3245. If you want to play some new games, though, get a better GPU. The 6670 won't cut it for next-gen.

Ok, but it will be good for Skyrim and the likes, right? cause I've got so many PC games to play I don't think ill be playing any next gen games for awhile lol, and Im somewhat unimployed (im 16, don't have time for job) so the parts im getting now pretty much has my budget maxed out.


It'll play Skyrim and every game released till now, but don't expect to play them at high settings. Next-gen, though, requirements are likely to go up and I don't believe you would be able to play the new games at a reasonable performance. Since your main priority is Dolphin, that PC will work just fine and probably play every game at 60FPS, since the GPU is much less important than the CPU in this case. You could probably get a better GPU by going with a AMD setup and play PC games at higher settings, but, at least for Dolphin, your performance is going to go down if you get an AMD processor, at least compared to that i3.

ok thanks a lot :)

oh and one more thing I was thinking about, I'm probably going to overclock my CPU but will that in a way slowly destroy it? what i mean is will it eventually stop working? I don't know much about overclocking :p and how high do you think I could overclock my processor?



 


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Can you find a Core i5 2500K/i7 2600K/i5 3570K/i7 3770K processor, cheap second hand? - Even those won't run Dolphin at full speed, unless you overclock, which you can't do on the i3.
Emulation loves CPU clockspeed, so jumping on an unlocked processor and overclocking it till the cows come home is your best bet.

You might also be able to find a Radeon 5770/6770 (Same chip) second hand or even new at a low price too, would be leaps ahead of the 6670, I would aim for a 6850 or 7770 at the very least though.



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