[Mirrorboy]

as i said in one of my other threads, i'm going to do a hardware upgrade soon. i've been on the fence as to whether or not emulation is important to me and i've decided that it is. i would want to run either pcsx2 or dolphin to play dbz budokai 1 and 2. here's the hardware i plan on getting:

-EVGA 113-M2-E113-TR nForce 730a and GeForce 8200 AMD Motherboard
-AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
-either 2 or 4GB of DDR2 RAM

as far as graphics go, i'll either be using my dedicated EVGA 8600GT or the built in GeForce 8200, both with 256MB. here are my questions:

-which emulator will work best on that hardware configuration (speed and graphics)?
-if this configuration isn't good for either of them, what would i have to change and what to?

i'm hoping to get a solid idea on what to buy soon so i can figure out how much it'll all cost and how i can get the money, so thanks in advance.

 

[Princess Garnet]

This is for PCSX2. I don't know about Dolphin, but it seems it follows the same things for wants as PCSX2 does.

1. A Core 2 Penryn at 4GHz (or more) is what you should optimally AIM for. If you can't get that, any Core 2 will be the next best (the E5x00 and E7x00 are good for cheap). The Phenom 2 (not the original Phenom) and Core i7 apparently do about as well, but results are scarce and incomplete, and they, too, need heavily overclocked to get those results. Honestly, the AMD Athlon X2 is the worst of the CPUs that pull off full speed, but since I'm guessing you're budget conscious here, it'll do okay if you perhaps overclock it, and you'll definitely need speed hacks.

2. A dual core CPU is about a requirement, but otherwise, it's speed it needs, so a faster dual core CPU is better than a slower dual core CPU. Remember, PCSX2 scales scarily linearly with clock speed (unlike PC games), so that extra MHz really helps alot.

3. GPU power still matters. An onboard GeForce 8200 is a joke. The GeForce 8600GT is the minimum recommendation. However, I'd spring for at least a GeForce 8800GT or similar. Consider your resolution desired. My GPU is good for ~1400x1050 internal resolution on many GPU limited games, like the Budokai Tenkaichi games and Smackdown vs RAW games.

4. As far as my experience goes, Dragonball Z Budokai and Dragonball Z Budokai 2 are actually more resource hungry than Dragonball Z Budokai 3 (or maybe I didn't play with the settings much for those two, as I think I was using ZeroGS at the time, which is now basically recommended against in favor of GSdx).

5. RAM doesn't matter beyond ~1GB (maybe less), but with prices so cheap and only going to climb from now on, there's no point getting only 2GB. Things are starting to show differences with 4GB now. If you get 2x1GB now, you'll kick yourself shortly when you have to add another 2x1GB or replace it entirely (4 modules is more difficult to overclock than 2 modules).

 

[cottonvibes]

you'll need at least a 8600gt for good graphics.

and the 6000x2 is just 'okay' for pcsx2, you'll find alot of games that you won't get full speed on with that cpu.

you want at least a c2d @ 3.2 ghz to get full speed in most games.

a c2d @ 4ghz, like Lord Zedeck mentioned, would be great for 95% of games pcsx2 is 'playable' with. any game needing more than that probably has some weird-problems.