Dolphin Emulator, Overclocking CPUs, and Air Cooling

So Dolphin is very CPU intense. I have an i7-3770k, which is 3.5 Ghz with "3.9 Ghz Turbo." (Oh, and a GeForce GTX 660 ti.)

I read a guide that says if I just buy one of these, I can push my CPU up to 4.4 Ghz with incredible ease, and very little extra stress. Or I could spend more money on some ridiculous cooling system and go up to 5.0 Ghz, but I don't think I'll be doing that.


So, do you think the extra CPU power would give me the little extra boost I need in Dolphin? I can't seem to keep Metroid Prime 3 at 60 FPS all the time. It dips down to 40 at the lowest, and stutters a bit.

Also, if I was going to overclock, do you really think I need that $50 cooling unit? I already have 5 120mm fans and 1 200mm fan in my system. (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139009). Two in the front and the giant one of the side bring air in, the one in the back and two on the top push it back out. And it's cold as fuck in my apartment.

From what I know (and I could be wrong), yes, the fan should allow you to push further. Your CPU gets hot in the way that an stove coil does, rather than a space heater, so while your PC may feel cool, your CPU is much hotter. As for the CPU working or not, technically it should. Is Dolphin set to use all the CPU cores or just a couple/half?

As far as I could tell, the only options were 1 core or 2. Not all.

edit: it's using about 4 of them fully, 3 of them at about 50%, and for whatever reason the last one doesn't really budge at all (all according to the task manager).

Gaaaah... okay, your problem isn't the graphics card, that's for sure. 2084MB is plenty for Gamecube graphic emulation. The problem is definitely the CPU speed. Now here's where it gets sticky.

From what I see in my head, you ought to have sufficient cooling with all those fans and a low ambient temp. On the other hand, overclocking is dangerous and theres a point of diminishing returns on the performance/heat output scale. I don't know where the extra 1.5Ghz would put you.

If it were my system, I'd try it and see what happened. worst case scenario you get to install a new MoBo and chip. Just keep in mind also that Dolphin 4.1 will stutter from time to time anyway, and the drop in framerate isn't going to kill you.

Tried it real quick. Didn't change the stuttering at all, and temperatures got very high, very quickly.

Guess it might not be worth it. Oh well. Maybe someone someday will finally figure out what needs to be done to give Dolphin that final push to get rid of the stuttering for (all of) the Metroid Prime games. Prime 1 and 2 were fully playable with only a bit of stuttering in places you'd honestly expect, but Prime 3 plays in slow motion unless you stare at a featureless wall.

Well, I only got a AMD 6000+ with 3,22 GHz, with overclocking 3,33 GHz at best, else it overheat in about half hour or faster.
I also only got a GTX650Ti, overclocked from GPU Clock 941 Mhz to 1130 Mhz and the Memory clock from 5400 Mhz to 7000 Mhz and the Dolphin x64 (you should install that, if you have a 64 bit Windows, because it runs faster on these. In fact it doubles the FPS.) runs with 60FPS in allmost every game.

I have to limit the FPS to sound, because so the stuttering stops, but it works fine. Tested it with Phantasy Star Online Episode 1 & 2, Resident Evil Zero and many others.
But the importanst thing is to turn the framelimit option to Audio, because that will give the biggest FPS boost and stops the stuttering. :3

For the graphics you need to switch sometimes the backend from Direct3D9 to Direct3D11, or else some games wouldn't run.
For the graphiccard option make sure, that it names your Graphiccard.
For the last thing go to the Hacks header and make a hook by the option "OpenMP Texture Decoder", the games should be run now much smoother, I hope I could help with the problem. :3 (\s/)

Sorry, but I've done or am already doing all of those things.

The fan might be able to help your performance if the stuttering is due to the chip being too hot, but if it's still stuttering on other Wii games, overclocking might not help. The CPU architecture between Wii and GC emulation must be a different change in regards to how it handles different CPU's. For example, the GC unit requires much less computing power, so a chip with a larger power and infrastructure can 'emulate' the GC's CPU with ease, as it doesn't get overextended. However, the Wii's CPU must not work as well due to the changes in cores, etc. Have you tried running other Wii games to see if it's the emulator itself causing the stuttering?

(Also note that all this information comes from knowledge on PS1/2 emulation, I couldn't get the Resident Evil remake to work on Dolphin and gave up after like four hours, so I could be totally wrong.)

Mario Kart Wii has had no problems for me, even with local 2 player. It only stutters right before selecting the level for some reason, but not during play, even seriously upscaled and enhanced (looks brilliant, too). I haven't tried any other Wii games yet, unless you count WiiWare or VC games, which all ran fine even though it's ridiculous running an emulator to run another emulator just to run a N64 game because N64 emulators are complete shit.

Anyway, to the best of my knowledge, the audio micro-stuttering is just a problem that *all* Metroid Prime games have on Dolphin, but again, 3 is the worst.

The N64 emulator is really bad, there you are right only about 25%, at best 50% of games runs on it. :/
The worst game I had was Resident Evil Zero, I only had about 20FPS with all filters and 40FPS when I disable AA. :'( (\s/)