Emulation on a Budget: The Optiplex 3050 Mini PC

In this article, we'll explore the capabilities of the Optiplex 3050 mini PC, specifically its performance with various emulators. We'll delve into the use of Flycast Core inside Retro Arch, Sega Saturn emulation using Yobasi and Shiro Core, GameCube emulation with Dolphin's Vulcan back-end, and more.

Using Flycast Core Inside Retro Arch

The Optiplex 3050 mini PC is equipped to handle a wide range of emulators. One notable example is the use of the Flycast Core inside Retro Arch. When using this configuration, we can expect good performance. The European version of the console might only achieve speeds at 50 FPS, but with the right setup, we can push the limits and enjoy smooth gaming experiences.

Sega Saturn Emulation

Another emulator that performs exceptionally well on the Optiplex 3050 is Yobasi and Shiro Core for Sega Saturn emulation. The results are impressive, with games like Sega Rally running at full speed. This demonstrates the capabilities of this mini PC in handling demanding console emulations.

GameCube Emulation with Dolphin's Vulcan Back-end

Dolphin's Vulkan back-end is another notable emulator that can be run on the Optiplex 3050. We tested the game Sonic Colors, which originally ran at 30 FPS on the original console, and found that it performed exceptionally well when running in 720p with the Vulcan back-end. The same was true for Wii games, showcasing the emulator's ability to handle Nintendo's iconic consoles.

F Zero GX Emulation

The F Zero GX game is another notable example of the Optiplex 3050's performance capabilities. When run on Dolphin's Vulkan back-end, this game performed admirably, with no notable slowdowns even at high speeds. This demonstrates the potential for smooth and responsive gaming experiences when using this mini PC.

PS2 Emulation with PCSX2

The PS2 is another console that the Optiplex 3050 can handle, thanks to the use of PCSX2. While Linux-based emulation operating systems may struggle with performance due to the lack of a Vulcan implementation and opengl limitations, running on Windows with Directx 11 can greatly improve performance. We tested Gran Turismo 4, which still struggled at times, but overall demonstrates the potential for smooth gameplay.

3DS Emulation with Citra

Finally, we tested 3DS emulation using Citra, which used the OpenGL back-end due to its compatibility with Windows. The results were impressive, showcasing the emulator's ability to handle Nintendo's handheld consoles. With a decent performance level of 60 FPS and a 2x resolution upscale, this mini PC proves itself capable of handling demanding games.

Conclusion

The Optiplex 3050 mini PC is an excellent choice for those looking to build a budget-friendly gaming machine. While it may not be ideal for more demanding tasks or high-end configurations, its performance with various emulators showcases its capabilities. Whether you're running Retro Arch, Dolphin, Citra, or other emulators, this mini PC can deliver smooth and responsive gameplay experiences. If you're interested in purchasing one of these PCs, we recommend checking out eBay for available options.

For those looking to learn more about building a gaming machine on a budget, the Optiplex 3050 is an excellent starting point. With its compact size, affordable price, and impressive performance capabilities, this mini PC is definitely worth considering. Stay tuned for future articles and tutorials, as we'll continue to explore the world of emulation and gaming on a budget.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the emulation performance of this inexpensive dell office pc that i recently picked up on ebay for 155 dollars shipped to the door i'm a big fan of these mini office pcs but i've never had a dell version this is an optiplex 3050 and you can find these for cheaper or more expensive it really depends on your configuration but this one here like i mentioned was 155 shipped to the door we have a cheaper inland 128 gigabyte ssd it did have windows installed on it and uh you can swap this out no problem at all it's a 2.5 inch drive mechanical or ssd will work now with the 3050 this also has an m.2 slot and this one came with eight gigabytes of ram and luckily this is running in dual channel sometimes if you pick one of these up you might only have one 8 gig stick or if you go with a 4 gig model you're only gonna have one stick dual channel is definitely going to help out this built-in gpu and speaking of that this is actually powered by its 7th gen i5 cpu this is the 7500t the lower powered version but it does have those built-in intel uhd 630 graphics and on paper this should do a really great job with emulation it has a maximum boost clock of 3.3 we only have four cores here no extra threads but for dreamcast psp gamecube wii and even ps2 we should be able to get some pretty decent performance now along with this mini pc i also picked up a 2.4 gigahertz really cheap controller these are eight bucks on amazon and ebay and you can get like a two pack for around 15 to 16. i would highly recommend getting a higher quality controller but i wanted to keep this as cheap as possible and all in with what you see now this was under 163 dollars now this is not going to be a tutorial video but if this does work out i'll do a full tutorial and show you how to set this up but for this little pc here we're going to be running an operating system called bottosera if you're not familiar with botocera basically it's a linux-based emulation operating system kind of like retropie that you would run on the raspberry pi but this does run on x86 platforms like this mini dell we have here so i've already installed it to that 128 gigabyte ssd and with something like this or an operating system like this i think the best bet would be use a mechanical drive because you can get a one terabyte for much cheaper that way you can store a lot more games and this is a very lightweight operating system so running it from a mechanical drive will work out just fine so let's let this thing boot up i've got everything installed and like i mentioned this is not a tutorial video but if this does work out and this little pc performs like i'm hoping it will i will make a full tutorial so come on i got a lot of stuff installed here and there we have it as you see we're using emulation station this uses some standalone emulators and retro arch in the background to run our games and real quick let's go into the settings and i'll show you that we're using this little mini pc here it's the i5 7500t if i go to information you can see that we have that i5 7500t base clock of 2.7 gigahertz with a boost up to 3.3 this operating system is fully customizable we do have different themes that we can download i've installed a few here just to show you the first one we took a look at was the stock carbon theme but this one's known as epic new r and it's one of my favorites when it comes to autosara but we do have several that we can choose from we can download them directly from within the settings of bottoser as long as you're connected online and by the way with this little pc here i do have wi-fi and bluetooth working i'm also getting sound over hdmi and that's something that's really important when trying to get one of these mini pcs to work with these operating systems basically we have everything working with this little dell 3050 in this video i wanted to test some of the higher end emulators dreamcast psp we'll go with some gamecube some wii and even some ps2 if we can get good performance this would totally be worth doing but uh that's really why i'm making this first video here i want to see if it would be worth picking one of these up we do have everything working but we really need to check out the performance and just to give you a look here we do have sound working over hdmi just turn the menu music off so yeah let's go ahead and get into a little bit of gameplay uh first up let's go with something easy to run we'll do psp but i will be turning this up to 3x resolution we'll test a few more games while i'm filming the screen here but i do want to plug this into my game capture just to make it easier on me so the first one we'll go with let's do let's do burnout legends go ahead and launch this and you see the fps on screen i just have this turned on in the developer settings this can be totally disabled so let's go ahead and jump right into some gameplay fps is up in the top right hand corner so this is using the standalone version of ppsspp i'm using the opengl back end but we can swap the vulkan if we want to this was just performing really well and i am at 3x resolution this is not a super hard game to run i consider this a mid-range game and we're running at full speed but yeah we definitely need to test out some harder to run games like chains of olympus and we'll get into that in just a second but like i mentioned i do want to plug this into my game capture just so we can get a better look at everything i know it's kind of hard to see that fps up in the top while you're playing a game press start and select and it'll exit the game bring us right back in the emulation station and from here we can scroll through and start something else up next up we got one of the harder ones to run chains of olympus still using that standalone version of ppsspp i did swap over to vulcan from opengl and we're at 2x i went up to 3x but i did notice a few stutters here and there so 2x is kind of going to be the sweet spot at least with bottocera but it's working great next on the list we have dreamcast i'm using the flycast core inside retro arch and you might notice that this is only at 50 and that's because this is the european version but when it comes to dreamcast on a system like this whether you're using flycast or redream you're not going to have any trouble even upscaled over 1080p moving over to sega saturn this is another one that performs really well on this little 7500t using the yobasi and shiro core inside of retro arch and here we have sega rally running at full speed i had a good feeling it would do saturn really well here's gamecube using the standalone version of dolphin with the vulcan back in 720p automotive which is kind of one of my go-to's this is a harder one to emulate especially on lower-end chips we're running at 60 with that 720p upscale and it's working just fine fps is up in the top left-hand corner i know it's a bit hard to see but we are at full speed here another one i always like to test is f zero gx for gamecube still using that vulcan back in 720p outstanding performance here dolphin was working great with gamecube and we're getting the same kind of performance here with wii games this is sonic colors uh on the original console it only ran at 30 fps so that's what we have here but we're still at 720p and getting great performance and the final one i wanted to test here with that dolphin emulator is tatsunoko versus capcom when you're using lower end systems and there's lots of particles on screen this game does slow down a bit but even with that 720p upscale we're still at 60 even with the special moves going and finally here in botocere we have ps2 and i kind of thought that this would be the case when you're using pcsx2 that's the emulator we have going here for ps2 in linux you have to use opengl we don't have any kind of vulcan implementation yet and with linux we can't use dx11 but this doesn't mean that ps2 won't perform well on this machine you just have to be running windows with that directx 11 back in and this is kind of where i'm torn between these linux based emulation operating systems on these lower end machines because when it comes down to it in my experience for emulators like pc sx2 when you're working with a lower end cpu and gpu it does perform better with directx 11. we just can't pump out enough opengl performance with this uhd630 to get great performance in linux but when it comes to windows it will perform much better but this doesn't mean that every single ps2 game is going to run at full speed because as you can see here this is gran turismo 4. even with dx11 in windows we're still struggling but there's still a lot of ps2 games that'll be fully playable on a little machine like this and the final thing i wanted to test here was 3ds here's citra 2x resolution i'm still with windows right now but this does use the opengl back-end so we should get similar performance on linux i just already had it set up ready to go and performance is actually decent with 3ds on this mini pc so i gotta say this mini optiplex 3050 does a great job with emulation being in linux or windows but if you want to do that higher-end stuff i would definitely suggest using windows in something like launchbox but in the end it's really up to you like i mentioned at the beginning if i was able to get good performance out of this i will do a tutorial on installing botocer and getting everything set up and as you saw we got great performance with this little machine so definitely keep an eye on the channel because i will have a video coming soon and in the meantime if there's anything else you want to see running on this just let me know in the comments below but if you're interested in picking one of these up your best bet is to head over to ebay i'll leave a few links in the description you're going to have to put some bids in to get one of these for cheap but there are a ton of them for sale these are the tiny optiplex 3050s with the i5 7500t you can get these fully configured up to like 32 gigabytes of ram but 8 gigs of ram for a little emulation machine is more than enough you can get them with hard drives without hard drives it's really up to you but i will leave a few ebay links in the description in case you're interested in learning more about this but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watchinghey what's going on everybody it's eta prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the emulation performance of this inexpensive dell office pc that i recently picked up on ebay for 155 dollars shipped to the door i'm a big fan of these mini office pcs but i've never had a dell version this is an optiplex 3050 and you can find these for cheaper or more expensive it really depends on your configuration but this one here like i mentioned was 155 shipped to the door we have a cheaper inland 128 gigabyte ssd it did have windows installed on it and uh you can swap this out no problem at all it's a 2.5 inch drive mechanical or ssd will work now with the 3050 this also has an m.2 slot and this one came with eight gigabytes of ram and luckily this is running in dual channel sometimes if you pick one of these up you might only have one 8 gig stick or if you go with a 4 gig model you're only gonna have one stick dual channel is definitely going to help out this built-in gpu and speaking of that this is actually powered by its 7th gen i5 cpu this is the 7500t the lower powered version but it does have those built-in intel uhd 630 graphics and on paper this should do a really great job with emulation it has a maximum boost clock of 3.3 we only have four cores here no extra threads but for dreamcast psp gamecube wii and even ps2 we should be able to get some pretty decent performance now along with this mini pc i also picked up a 2.4 gigahertz really cheap controller these are eight bucks on amazon and ebay and you can get like a two pack for around 15 to 16. i would highly recommend getting a higher quality controller but i wanted to keep this as cheap as possible and all in with what you see now this was under 163 dollars now this is not going to be a tutorial video but if this does work out i'll do a full tutorial and show you how to set this up but for this little pc here we're going to be running an operating system called bottosera if you're not familiar with botocera basically it's a linux-based emulation operating system kind of like retropie that you would run on the raspberry pi but this does run on x86 platforms like this mini dell we have here so i've already installed it to that 128 gigabyte ssd and with something like this or an operating system like this i think the best bet would be use a mechanical drive because you can get a one terabyte for much cheaper that way you can store a lot more games and this is a very lightweight operating system so running it from a mechanical drive will work out just fine so let's let this thing boot up i've got everything installed and like i mentioned this is not a tutorial video but if this does work out and this little pc performs like i'm hoping it will i will make a full tutorial so come on i got a lot of stuff installed here and there we have it as you see we're using emulation station this uses some standalone emulators and retro arch in the background to run our games and real quick let's go into the settings and i'll show you that we're using this little mini pc here it's the i5 7500t if i go to information you can see that we have that i5 7500t base clock of 2.7 gigahertz with a boost up to 3.3 this operating system is fully customizable we do have different themes that we can download i've installed a few here just to show you the first one we took a look at was the stock carbon theme but this one's known as epic new r and it's one of my favorites when it comes to autosara but we do have several that we can choose from we can download them directly from within the settings of bottoser as long as you're connected online and by the way with this little pc here i do have wi-fi and bluetooth working i'm also getting sound over hdmi and that's something that's really important when trying to get one of these mini pcs to work with these operating systems basically we have everything working with this little dell 3050 in this video i wanted to test some of the higher end emulators dreamcast psp we'll go with some gamecube some wii and even some ps2 if we can get good performance this would totally be worth doing but uh that's really why i'm making this first video here i want to see if it would be worth picking one of these up we do have everything working but we really need to check out the performance and just to give you a look here we do have sound working over hdmi just turn the menu music off so yeah let's go ahead and get into a little bit of gameplay uh first up let's go with something easy to run we'll do psp but i will be turning this up to 3x resolution we'll test a few more games while i'm filming the screen here but i do want to plug this into my game capture just to make it easier on me so the first one we'll go with let's do let's do burnout legends go ahead and launch this and you see the fps on screen i just have this turned on in the developer settings this can be totally disabled so let's go ahead and jump right into some gameplay fps is up in the top right hand corner so this is using the standalone version of ppsspp i'm using the opengl back end but we can swap the vulkan if we want to this was just performing really well and i am at 3x resolution this is not a super hard game to run i consider this a mid-range game and we're running at full speed but yeah we definitely need to test out some harder to run games like chains of olympus and we'll get into that in just a second but like i mentioned i do want to plug this into my game capture just so we can get a better look at everything i know it's kind of hard to see that fps up in the top while you're playing a game press start and select and it'll exit the game bring us right back in the emulation station and from here we can scroll through and start something else up next up we got one of the harder ones to run chains of olympus still using that standalone version of ppsspp i did swap over to vulcan from opengl and we're at 2x i went up to 3x but i did notice a few stutters here and there so 2x is kind of going to be the sweet spot at least with bottocera but it's working great next on the list we have dreamcast i'm using the flycast core inside retro arch and you might notice that this is only at 50 and that's because this is the european version but when it comes to dreamcast on a system like this whether you're using flycast or redream you're not going to have any trouble even upscaled over 1080p moving over to sega saturn this is another one that performs really well on this little 7500t using the yobasi and shiro core inside of retro arch and here we have sega rally running at full speed i had a good feeling it would do saturn really well here's gamecube using the standalone version of dolphin with the vulcan back in 720p automotive which is kind of one of my go-to's this is a harder one to emulate especially on lower-end chips we're running at 60 with that 720p upscale and it's working just fine fps is up in the top left-hand corner i know it's a bit hard to see but we are at full speed here another one i always like to test is f zero gx for gamecube still using that vulcan back in 720p outstanding performance here dolphin was working great with gamecube and we're getting the same kind of performance here with wii games this is sonic colors uh on the original console it only ran at 30 fps so that's what we have here but we're still at 720p and getting great performance and the final one i wanted to test here with that dolphin emulator is tatsunoko versus capcom when you're using lower end systems and there's lots of particles on screen this game does slow down a bit but even with that 720p upscale we're still at 60 even with the special moves going and finally here in botocere we have ps2 and i kind of thought that this would be the case when you're using pcsx2 that's the emulator we have going here for ps2 in linux you have to use opengl we don't have any kind of vulcan implementation yet and with linux we can't use dx11 but this doesn't mean that ps2 won't perform well on this machine you just have to be running windows with that directx 11 back in and this is kind of where i'm torn between these linux based emulation operating systems on these lower end machines because when it comes down to it in my experience for emulators like pc sx2 when you're working with a lower end cpu and gpu it does perform better with directx 11. we just can't pump out enough opengl performance with this uhd630 to get great performance in linux but when it comes to windows it will perform much better but this doesn't mean that every single ps2 game is going to run at full speed because as you can see here this is gran turismo 4. even with dx11 in windows we're still struggling but there's still a lot of ps2 games that'll be fully playable on a little machine like this and the final thing i wanted to test here was 3ds here's citra 2x resolution i'm still with windows right now but this does use the opengl back-end so we should get similar performance on linux i just already had it set up ready to go and performance is actually decent with 3ds on this mini pc so i gotta say this mini optiplex 3050 does a great job with emulation being in linux or windows but if you want to do that higher-end stuff i would definitely suggest using windows in something like launchbox but in the end it's really up to you like i mentioned at the beginning if i was able to get good performance out of this i will do a tutorial on installing botocer and getting everything set up and as you saw we got great performance with this little machine so definitely keep an eye on the channel because i will have a video coming soon and in the meantime if there's anything else you want to see running on this just let me know in the comments below but if you're interested in picking one of these up your best bet is to head over to ebay i'll leave a few links in the description you're going to have to put some bids in to get one of these for cheap but there are a ton of them for sale these are the tiny optiplex 3050s with the i5 7500t you can get these fully configured up to like 32 gigabytes of ram but 8 gigs of ram for a little emulation machine is more than enough you can get them with hard drives without hard drives it's really up to you but i will leave a few ebay links in the description in case you're interested in learning more about this but that's it for this one and like always thanks for watching\n"