Please weigh in on some statements and related questions.

Is it true that PCSX2 favors NVidia chips over ATI? I do personally believe Nvidia's driver support exceeds ATI's driver support.

Regarding PCSX2 performance, Two Cores vs Four Cores doesn't matter. Is it accurate that the raw GHz matter the most?

Years from now, there will still be mainstream developers writing games that don't utilize more than two cores. As long as quad-cores are fast enough, I personally would buy one. My goal with the benchmarks below were to help determine if quad-cores are fast enough.


Prices from NewEgg
The i7 940 is included because it is close to 3.0 GHz.
The i7 920 is included because it is still barely in my price range ;-)




FPS from anandtech.com
Phenom II X4 940 & 920
- their charts had Anthlon X2 7750 @ 2.7 GHz
- 2.7 * 1.11 = 2.977 - FPS for that CPU were adjusted 11.1% in my image.


Based on this LIMITED set of four benchmarks, the i7s have a slight advantage in performance / clock rate ratio.

The costs of the i7 platform overall ( CPU, MoBo, Ram ), puts that extra performance at a premium. If I had to purchase a system today, I don't think I could justify the price for an i7.

With that said, do you need to overclock current CPUs to get good emulation performance?

Dig

Why did you write all that stuff just to ask "do I need to overclock"..? You don't need to, but many games would certainly benefit.

PCSX2 doesn't favor nvidia nor ati, simply because it doesn't process graphics itself

Two Cores vs Four Cores doesn't matter
Well of course it doesn't, since PCSX2 doesn't support more than 2 cores. But, GSDX may support 4 cores for software rendering.