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core i3 vs core i5 2500k
JoeB:
My old MAME machine was an AMD 2400+ with 256mb of ram. It was slower than most pentium 4 machines, but it ran almost all MAME games (except the newest 3d ones - but they look like crap on 15khz monitor anyways)
The only reason I upgraded to i3 was because of Hyperspin. It's written in flash, eats RAM for breakfast and craps on most CPUs. I'm sure if it was written in C++ (like most modern applications) then I'd still be using the old CPU. But alas, developers are "lazy" they want full apps in 20 lines of code - so they use flash, .net, java, (name your crappy byte code compiled Lang of the day)
Take a look at all the games you play. Most zip files are less than 1mb big! They should play fine on any modern system - even net books (if you don't use Hyperspin)
PIZZ:
--- Quote from: mytymaus007 on February 04, 2012, 01:42:26 pm ---What emulators use the most resources GPU and CPU im trying to build for the future without spending all my money. I dont care to much about PC games because i know thats where the most intense systems will be needed but im building a system just for emulators.
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Mame, Daphni, Neo-Geo, Sega, NES emulators should all be good on i3
PS1&2, NES 64, Xbox emulators and most pc games you'll need i5 or better.
JoeB:
--- Quote from: PIZZ on February 05, 2012, 07:25:44 am ---
--- Quote from: mytymaus007 on February 04, 2012, 01:42:26 pm ---What emulators use the most resources GPU and CPU im trying to build for the future without spending all my money. I dont care to much about PC games because i know thats where the most intense systems will be needed but im building a system just for emulators.
--- End quote ---
Mame, Daphni, Neo-Geo, Sega, NES emulators should all be good on i3
PS1&2, NES 64, Xbox emulators and most pc games you'll need i5 or better.
--- End quote ---
Is there a technical reason for this? Or just because i5 costs more, you assumed that was the case?
i5 does have 2 more cores than i3, but i3 is hyper-threaded which i5 is not. Both run at the exact same speed, and have the same CPU features. So with this i5 all you pay for is 2 more cores. If you use an application that was developed for only single processor (like most) than you will not notice the difference.
Don't believe me? Google for i3 vs core 2 Quad benchmarks. All benchmarks I found showed that the i3 was 20-30% faster than core 2 quad because most games/apps were not developed to take advantage of the 4 cores, i3 beat the quad cores on CPU speed alone (3.2ghz vs <3 ghz). Only video encoding was faster on quad, because the app they were using actually used all 4 cores!
Back to original question. If you're using apps that utilize all 4 cores, or do heavy multi-tasking, than buy the i5. But if you're going to only use a single emulator in a dedicated system, then you'll be wasting $$ by moving to i5/i7. Take that money and spend it on other components.
Also, if possible, try to use all 64-bit. Either Windows 7-64, or XP 64 (which isn't really XP - but rather much more similar to vista/7). You'll get 10-20% boost using mame64.
PIZZ:
I've tested these emulators on my friends i3 and my i5 and we saw a difference in the n64 and ps1/2. That said if youre just running mame go for i3 but you can get an i5 now for the price of what an i3 cost when it first launched.
mytymaus007:
--- Quote from: PIZZ on February 05, 2012, 08:43:13 am ---I've tested these emulators on my friends i3 and my i5 and we saw a difference in the n64 and ps1/2. That said if youre just running mame go for i3 but you can get an i5 now for the price of what an i3 cost when it first launched.
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Thats what i figured good looking out always nice having a friends pc to work with to compare. What type of GPU did you use or not to test n64 and ps1/2 eulators not sure i thought i read an article here about ATi cards vs Nvidia cards for emulators