Quick Update and more Performance Tuning - Long time no post!
Many thanks to [USER=43]@Josh | NFC[/USER] for the attempts at getting powdercoat to work out - through absolutely no fault of his, the colors just didn't work, and I'm very grateful for the attempt (and, sheesh, the willingness to still sell me a case in the end). I'm incredibly impressed by Josh's attention to detail and refusal to accept less than perfect results. Thanks man.
I've got the build in a working state and have been doing some profiling at 4k60, which was totally unexpected. I can't believe that this machine is able to render a consistent 60fps at this resolution, but it most certainly can even with some of the most brutal RetroArch shaders in existence enabled.
One big change I made on the machine was to disable Hyperthreading:
..we're watching CPU utilization while rendering one of the more demanding SNES games (funny that it's taking this much horsepower to emulate something from 1990, right?). Red and green lines are % Processor Time for each core. I should point out that this is using the bsnes-balanced core, which focuses on cycle accuracy and thus requires quite a bit more grunt. Mednafen PSX is another great example of this (and PS1 games are fully playable on this rig, if you're wondering).
One of the things I noticed right away was that RetroArch is just putting all its work onto a very consistent 8 threads, no matter what system or core I had loaded up. With Hyperthreading on, utilization would be affected by any sort of context switch from things happening in the background or whatever. It's possible that Windows 10's upcoming Game Mode may help with this sort of situation, but for now I'm able to get consistent 60fps (versus intermittent dips to 50-55) with HT off.
In Dolphin, I then actually had to disable dual-core speedups. This put more overall utilization on the processor but gave me a much more consistent, playable framerate. I noticed a ton of context switching with the Dolphin option enabled (and I was getting around 11-20 fps), so having that option enabled may be much more effective with HT on, or especially with 4+ core processors. I'd say experiment both ways, particularly if you have a high frequency dual core processor like this one.
Overall, I'm extremely pleased with the hardware selection. I've used the stock HDPLEX cables temporarily and things are a mess inside the case, but it does fit and work fine. I've got supplies on the way to make some shorter cables, and I'll share some more pictures then.
