Dolphin is an emu that can make Wii games look very good and also mean I can use HDMI out on the PC to work with my current setup. I've been recommended an AMD 6570 or an Nvidia GTX550i. Thing is the AMD is half the price of the Nvidia offering.
I'm not exactly au fait with current graphical offerings but I can see there are some stark differences to the two in terms of clock speed of GPU/Memory so could anyone give me an idea as to whether these recommendations stack up.
I imagine someone here is already using Dolphin so hopefully one of you guys up to scratch on the current hardware situation can recommend a decent GPU. Looking at around £70 but I can go upto £120 probably.
edit: Also, I'm happy to spend a bit more to get one that'll last a little while. I will eventually upgrade the entire thing. One day. I have an old Enermax Liberty 500W Modular ATX2.2 PSU, will that suffice for newer stuff? I wont be changing it right now but if it'll limit my GPU options severely I'll have to change it.
I'd never heard about Dolphin, just had a look and it looks pretty amazing.
Who's going to be the first to see if it works on the Microserver? :ptu:
I always thought Dolphin was the Dreamcast emulator?
I won't be giving it a go as I have no graphics card in mine and I'm running unRAID anyway, otherwise i'd have a try :)
Anyone got any clues as to what is gonna offer me best value for a graphics card? My old mobo only supports the older pcie but if needs be, as I said, I'll buy more components eventually.
List up your rig (mobo , memory etc) & then i,ll have a look.
Cheers bigsteve :)
ASUS M2A-VM mobo
Corsair 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ 2.6Ghz
As I said, I'm open to chopping and changing the set up and I'd happily purchase a gfx card for a bit more money in the knowledge an upgrade to other components would help it.
An extra 2gb of memory would look good if you only have 2gb ;)
As for Graphics the 550 is an item that has been reduced in cost due to age, the 6570 is newer but doesn't seem to have the ability of the older card.
TBH now a 460 or a 6850 would probably be a better option. A 6870 might be slightly outside your price range.
It runs on the microserver! :-D Not fantastically but I *ahem* loaded a MarioKart iso and it ran without glitching, it was a bit laggy on panning shots and seemed to be running a little slower but hopefully it can be tweaked.
So on topic, HIS HD 6450 Silence Edition is barely sufficient (although it might be a CPU limit) :)
I'm sure I have 4x1gb sticks serious. I put the 2gb in because thats all that was on the old order. I'll have to take a look though and see for certain. RAM is quite cheap nowadays so I'm not worried about that too much.
Installed it on my HTPC to have a look, (so only have had chance to test it with one game) with AA and Anisotropic maxed out it was running at 99-100% speed, I was quite shocked how well it runs straight out the box tbh.
The rig: i5 650 (3.2GHz), 4 gigs Ram and ATI 4890.
I fired up GPU-Z and task manager they reported the max GPU and CPU loads was 44% on the GPU and around 60-65% on the CPU. A 6570 is a lot slower than a 4890 so I would be tempted to maybe go for something faster to give you some overhead, as suggested above maybe a 6850 which can be picked up for around the 100 mark.
So, an ATI 6850 would suffice for decent performance, right?
Games at the moment are not my worry but it'd be nice if the contemporary games will run ok on my choice. I understand the rest of the pc will probably be the weak point but as I said earlier I'm looking into it.
Thanks for all the help guys. I'm also looking to play pcsx2 aswell but hopefully that wont be as demanding as Dolphin.
Sorry for the double reply. Gonna be buying a GTX 460 by the looks of it. 1gb model, that'll definitely get me to a point where my CPU/Mem is the bottleneck on most things nowadays.