| dahuman said: Core i5 is the way to go atm, but I also do a lot of encoding and media editing on top of other things ^^; The thing is also an absolute beast when it comes to PS2 emulation <3 PS2 games in HD look much nicer lol. |
Well, for encoding yes 9and if you are heavy into encoding etc, you should chose the i7), but any dual core at 3.1+ can run any emulated ps2 games (that the emulator will run of course) just fine. Also, the emulator does not use more than 2 cores, so a quad is not important. The i5, clock for clock, is faster than the phenom II, but again, phenoms are a better value and the emulator is fine on a $100 CPU. The HD resolutions are based on how good your GPU is.
Where quads are becoming important is newer games. Look at Dragon Age. A quad runs it significantly better than a dual, which I believe gets bottlenecked at 40ish fps (have to look up exact numbers). Newer games will start using 3+ cores more and more as it is definatly trending that way.
As for the graphic card bottleneck Casey, I am not quite getting your argument. Your saying that CPUs are bottlenecking high end cards, which is right for some games, but then go on to state that those resolutions abover 1920X1200 are hard on the gpu, which is also right. CPU limits minimum frames and if it is the bottleneck then you will get the same fps if you are running at 800x600 or 1920X1200, but if gpu is the bottleneck, you will get lower fps as you add better detail settings and increase resolutions. But, the op is not gaming at even 1920 X 1200, so he is more likely to run into a cpu bottleneck with something like l4d.
Now Playing: The Witcher (PC)
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