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Enough power to run mame? Any suggestions?
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cyapps:
I was wondering if this atom based motherboard could run most if not all mame games. I seen it on a episode of Hak5 where he was building a boxee box. I was going to use my old 1.4ghz amd athlon but this is only $190 and all I need to add is power, memory and storage.
 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131635

Also is there an up to date build list for a mame pc on the cheap?

Thanks
ragnar:
An atom is slightly slower than a P4 clock for clock.  So the 1.6 GHz atom you like is similar in performance to say, a 1.4 GHz P4.

That should be plenty of power for most games.  The thing is, the performance of hte atom will probably be on par with the AMD Athlon at 1.4 GHz.

It would be cheaper and resulting in better performance to just upgrade the Athlon processor that you already have.
Digital Vandal:
I have a dell dimension 3000 with a celeron 2.4ghz, 512mb ram (DDR1) and built in graphics. Is this capable if I was to put a better graphics card in with SVHS? Or would I be better off with maybe a core2duo? I plan on running pretty much everything in time but the most important games are the street fighter series upto and including SF3 3rd strike. I have noticed with the pc as it is that the front ends struggle and the video plays extremely sluggishly and playing MK4 on it was funny in a car crash sorta way. Least I had plenty of time to plan my next move.  ;D
spauldingd:
The video card won't improve performance for MAME but the S-Video connection should be good for sending to a TV.  All that matters to MAME is raw CPU speed.  Multiple CPUs won't help too much either except that the other CPUs can take what little load there is for the other processes.  2.4 GHz should be fine for 95% of the MAME roms.

Turnarcades:
This question is cropping up a LOT on the forums again recently; newbies you should do a search and you'll see it's been answered a lot too. For reference, I've worked extensively with borderline-spec PC's and these are some of my responses, which I've linked to many times:


--- Quote ---You're going to get a huge range of opinions on this so let me just give you some benchmarks I'm happy with after much testing:

P3 1Ghz, 128/256mb RAM, on-board graphics and sound; More than good enough to cover most arcade games (even Neo-Geo) excluding most .chd games and more advanced polygonal (post-16-bit era) games like Tekken etc. Some Midway games will run ok with a small amount of frameskip but others will be far too choppy to play properly. Will be able to play pretty much all 16-bit era consoles and lower with no trouble. 32X+Mega CD emulation is near-perfect, and if you add a decent graphics card you should be able to squeeze N64 emulation out of it or similar.

P4 1.6Ghz+, 256/512mb RAM, on-board graphics+sound; As above but will play some .chd and Midway games better, plus you will see noticable improvements in 3D fighters etc. N64 emulation is great even without an extra graphics card, plus you can run PS1 and a few other consoles on the same level with little trouble. Noticable improvements in rom boot times and lag/frameskip across all platforms.

P4 2.4Ghz+, 1Gb RAM, decent graphics+sound cards; As previously but will be closer to achieving playable speed on the most demanding MAME games. More RAM should improve seamless launching between emulators/games/frontends and allow for more front-end frills and visual filter effects on games with little impact on performance.

This is just my opinion after much testing of various-grade platforms. I advise using XP (but be sure to remove/stop all unwanted services and memory-sapping background apps) and simpler front-ends that don't demand too many resources if you go further down the scale. I will also add that when using either of the first two specs You would be better off with a pre-0.106 build of MAME as newer versions have compatibility problems on older hardware (trust me on this one) and from 0.100 onwards don't really bring much worthwhile to the table anyway.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---3.2Ghz modest?!

If you're talking about pre-3D/polygonal games then you barely need an old P3, as long as it is set up correctly, with maybe a low-end P4 to get those awkward Midway games running well, or around a 2Ghz model for chds and those few properly-emulated 3D games. Anything over 3Ghz is overkill, as trying to get those latest-supported, high demand games will show little improvement no matter how high you go. In which case, it's better to stay with older MAME versions anyway as I dont think the additions following the 0.106 rebuild will reach their full potential until the emulation is improved with further subsequent releases and optimisation with newer hardware is correctly done by the MAME devs.

I'm sticking with my trusty custom build of 0.105, you can keep your NFL pap.
--- End quote ---


--- Quote ---Sorry peeps, gotta pipe in again and defend lower-spec systems. I have consistently had certain 3D fighters working fine as low as 2Ghz using older builds of MAME, when the emulation core was less mature. Using the correct display and frameskip settings, I had Tekken 1 running fine as well as SF EX. Also I've had N64 and even PS1 running sweet as low as 1.6Ghz, though found 1.8Ghz is better, so sod 3D fighters in MAME as the PS1 had many of them ported over, with more characters, versus modes and more features. Oh, and the systems I'm talking about don't have massive RAM or additional graphics/sound cards either, just average on-board NVIDIA graphics. My minimum spec to run what I've mentioned would be 1.6Ghz with 256mb RAM, but I'd say it all runs just great for what is worth playing at 2.4Ghz with 1GB RAM - just optimise Windows and use a pre-0.106 build of MAME.
--- End quote ---
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