Specifications Enough ?

[metalnumb]

Hey !
I know i Ask This In The Forums A Lot But .. It Could Be The Last Time I Bother You Guys
Are These Spec. Enough for pcsx2 and dolphin emulation to get to playable speeds for most games ? " well that's what my budget can get

CPU: intel core 2 duo E8600 or core 2 quad Q8200 OC ?
GPU: 9400GT or 9600 or 9800 GT @ 512mb ?
RAM : 2GB
MB : GIGABYTE GA-P31-ES3G
COOLER FOR OC : master-cooler hyper ???

so what's your opinion people !?
thanks in advance !

[DKTronics]

The E8600 is way overpriced, get a E8400 and clock it to 4Ghz.
Do NOT get a 9400GT, stick with a 9600 or 9800GT, although there is little difference between them in price, so I would get the 9800GT or even the 250GTS ( a re-badged 9800GTX).
Don't bother with a aging P31 motherboard if you intend to overclock, stick with at least P43 (good for around 400fsb), or a P45 (good for 400-500+ fsb).
RAM, just add another 2Gb since RAM is cheap at the moment. Get PC-6400 DDR2 800mhz if you intend to run up to 400 fsb, and PC-8500 1066mhz if you plan on going up to 533 fsb.

[Bositman]

Processor at 3 Ghz + is enough for most games. Get at keast tge 9600, the 9400 is crappy

[metalnumb]

thanks guys !

[ellachen0417]

I would go for the 9800 GT. The 9400 is worthless for anything outside of HTPC, if the fact that there are models of that card that come with passive cooling is any indication. My PC came with that card by default, it was slower than even my old 8600 GT. (Basically, model numbers for nvidia cards from the 6 to 9 series are easy to figure out. The lower the second digit is, the slower it is. Cards with second digits lower than 5 are not advisable if you want to play games at decent speeds).

For nVidia card, I think 9500 GT and 8600 GT is the bare minimum (the 9500 GT is basically a rebranded and DX10 capable version of the 8600 GT).

I've only had ATI experience with a 1650 Pro. It was fast enough to go toe to toe with my 9500 GT on some games, but I swapped it out because I didn't like the extra molex connector requirement.

I think either of the CPU options you have will do, and can run most of the PS2 games you throw at it fine (since both are faster than the one I use), except the ones that PCSX2 can't run fullspeed even at today's hardware.

[metalnumb]

so core 2 quad is not good ? even in the next 3 or 4 years for emulation generally ?
my guess is if there will be emulators for the next-gen consoles like ps3 and 360 it will need those 4 cores and at a high clock speeds .. maybe i'm looking forward to it although i know that's a really hard job for coders.. but it could happen , right ? nothing impossible..what's the difficulties as an advanced coder ?

[Air]

my guess is if there will be emulators for the next-gen consoles like ps3 and 360 it will need those 4 cores and at a high clock speeds .. maybe i'm looking forward to it

Try 8 cores and extremely high clock speeds. And really the usability of multiple cores to emulate the current generation of consoles is debatable. It depends a lot on how the games are coded. If a PS3 game uses the "micro-scale" approach to utilizing the PPUs (where each ppu performs a short and specific task and then passes the result to the next SPU), multithreading them efficiently on a PC will be neigh impossible due to complicated thread synchronization overhead. The CELL cpus have a built in mechanism for handling those cases very efficiently, but desktops have nothing like it.

[ellachen0417]

Besides, a large number of 360 and PS3 titles worth our while have PC ports. (Wii games are rarely ported, but Wii emulation is already fairly advanced these days *wink, nudge*)

[metalnumb]

uh,man ! 8 cores cpu is not enough ? i'm sorry .. CELL cpus ? what's that ?
i guess after a couple of years it's easier to get a ps3 as it will have a price drop !!
now i get it ! okay people ! 2 cores cpu is just fine !!

[Air]

The CELL is the core CPU for the PS3. A modified version of the CELL is used for the XBOX360.

The CELL cpu has one primary hyper-threaded core (making it near-dual core in nature), 8 subsidiary cores (called SPEs), and one internal EIB (which is like an uber fancy on-die DMA controller). All cores are clocked at 3.2ghz. The primary core is intended for use as a thread regulator. It directs the 8 SPUs and the EIB controller. The SPEs each have their own internal memory that's basically the same thing as your CPU's L1 cache -- near-zero-latency memory accesses which are not contended by any other core in the CPU.

The good news is that the PS3 has "only" 7 SPEs. It actually has 8 SPEs on die, but one of them is disabled. This lowers manufacturing costs because dies typically have a single core that fails stability tests, so instead of junking the chip they just disable the bad core and move on. (if a chip has 2 bad cores then they still have to junk it). So the PS3 can manage a maximum of 8 concurrent threads of execution. The XBOX 360 uses a slightly different design that is, I think three primary cores side-by-side (for a total of 6 concurrent threads). It doesn't use SPEs.

Because of its hands on specialized design, the CELL is extremely difficult to code for, and the SPEs are only efficient when doing certain types of patterned processing (multimedia, decoding, decompression, particle effects logic) -- where-as desktop PCs are comparatively very developer friendly and flexible, but do not excel at such tasks. Additionally, the EIB has some ungodly max bandwidth transfer rate, since most of its transfers are on-die L1/L2 cache accesses. It tops out around 200gb/sec. The i7 with 1600mhz DDR3 ram tops out around 26gb/sec. So you can have all the cores and ghz in the world and you'd still have trouble emulating a PS3.