HTPC config for PCSX2

[Medallish]

Hi I’m working on an upgrade to my HTPC so it can run PCSX2 and emulate PS2 games, I have a power budget of 230W’s and this is how I’m planning to spend it
The AMD Athlon X4 860K, it’s essentially an 7850k without the GPU, has a TDP of 95W
R7-260X 2GB, it’s small and should be powerful enough to handle the graphics I’m considering, and based on this benchmark I found a 860k + 270X uses 255W @ full load so hopefully what I’m considering should end below 230W.
All packed in the Asrock FM2A88X-ITX+
The rest is fairly standard 8GB 2133MHz memory kit although likely I’ll scale that back to 1600MHz or something to conserve power, and since I’m not going the IGP route I don’t imagine that has much effect on PCSX2?
And an SSD for the system and possibly a mechanical disc for games, although if loading times don’t suffer I might just have these on my NAS.

I have very little experience with PCSX2 and decided I was going to use it because although I have a PS2, the trouble of getting comfortable wireless controllers and memory cards seemed too much vs. emulating it, I do know HW fairly well(And yes that Intel would likely work better) and from what I’ve read PCSX2 isn’t a heavily multithreaded program, so the higher I can manage to get the CPU running the better, I’m hoping as it’s not an APU and it doesn’t have to share power with the iGPU that the CPU performance will be slightly better than the 7850K benchmarks that I’ve seen which has been ok for the most part? As far as the graphics it also seems PCSX2 doesn’t require a lot on that front?

The main game I’ll be trying my luck with on this machine is Burnout 3 Takedown, although I would like it to run everything the PS2 has to offer.

For those interested, I’m going to cram it all in this case.
[Image: FC5-2.jpg]

Based on your experiences is there anything wrong with this build? The CPU(It’s either the 860K or a 7850K) and mobo is decided on as they are parts I have lying around, the GPU is the one thing I haven’t gotten yet.

[Black Ops]

Your gpu is solid for graphics. You should be able to run the games you've mentioned but you wont be able run to run demanding games such as gran turismo jak etc mainly because of the cup. Your build is still good and will run most games

[Nobbs66]

you'll have to overclock quite a bit for burnout to be be playable

[pyr0]

Did you check this thread?: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-CPU-Bench...d-on-FFX-2
"57.04 FPS - SLUS 20672 - AMD A10-7850K - 3.7 GHz Stock (Turbo Core ON) - ||dav1de||"

It should give you an idea what the AMD 860K (aka 7850K) can deliver on the CPU side.

[Medallish]

Did you check this thread?: http://forums.pcsx2.net/Thread-CPU-Bench...d-on-FFX-2
"57.04 FPS - SLUS 20672 - AMD A10-7850K - 3.7 GHz Stock (Turbo Core ON) - ||dav1de||"

It should give you an idea what the AMD 860K (aka 7850K) can deliver on the CPU side.

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah I did, although I mainly focused on this:
60.94 FPS - SLUS 20672 - AMD A8-5600K - 4.0 GHz OC (Turbo disabled, DDR3 1866, iGPU) - DaTankAC
Hoping I will be able to slightly push the baseclock to 4GHz on the 860K in my build

It was more the build as a whole I was thinking, maybe it was pointless to go dedicated graphics or something.

[Medallish]

you'll have to overclock quite a bit for burnout to be be playable

So is burnout more demanding than Final Fantasy X-2 used in the CPU benchmark sticky?

[Blyss Sarania]

Yeah.

[Medallish]

Well installed it on one of my other PC's with very similar specs(7850K + 280X), this obviously needs some tweaking as I kept having graphical errors despite my settings(missing textures seemed to be the main part I saw). The game actually runs acceptable, usually around 50-60fps but will dip down as low as 38fps and have some slowdowns, I'm still not 100% into the workings of this program, didn't see much difference using the MTVU "hacks" but I also didn't manage to change the rendered resolution so it's possible I missed something, will need to continue on this tomorrow, will need to see if I can pick up FF XII-2 so I can do some benchmarking, Burnout 3 is a little too inconsistent imo.

[Blyss Sarania]

My overclocked FX6300 has similar single threaded performance to those chips (slightly greater) and I still get slowdown in B3.

[Medallish]

My overclocked FX6300 has similar single threaded performance to those chips (slightly greater) and I still get slowdown in B3.

Yeah the FX-6300 has a nice L3 cache, my main Desktop is an FX-9590 so I don't think it will be a problem to reach 60fps on that for the most part, but I was hoping to keep it to a fairly small case that fits under my TV and doesn't stand out. I'll still try and do some tweaks especially this coming weekend, hopefully most games will run nice.

It's such a shame though, I read some earlier threads on this, there's no doubt PCSX2 has made massive progress over the years(Based on what I've read and seen), and yet emulating a decade old processor is still so hard. Is there any further optimizations possible on x86 or will this just the state HW emulating is in until something more powerful comes out?