Amd 6 core VS i5 (Yea I know Mame only uses 2 cores)

[tommyinajar]

   I saw this deal and it looked pretty good-

Is there going to be any benefit in getting an i5 and mobo that would cost almost the same price as the AMD bundle? I want to run Hyperspin, all the pins, and try some CHD's.

http://slickdeals.net/f/3901866-AMD-6-Core-2-7GHz-Barebones-PC-284-99-After-Rebates

[redbeard30]

If you have a microcenter near, they have a 4 core amd 960black edition 3.0ghz w/ gigabyte board for 109.00. My buddy got this w/ 8gigs ram for 153 total. Quite a bit cheaper than an i5, but i5 is a bit speedier. Should work well for mame, plus being a black edition, easily overclocked.

[JoeB]

general question:  If someone is going to put a dedicated PC inside a real arcade machine, does it make sense to overclock it? Doesn't overclocking generate more heat?  And unlike a PC that sits on top of your PC, isn't the inside of an arcade machine create a lot less air flow and higher chances for hardware failure due to heat?

[Bramlet]

Yeah, for me I would want a low power computer. Whatever board generates the least amount of heat and uses the least amount of power while still playing everything I want to play flawlessly. So say I want to play mame and some old school emulators. What setup should I be looking at? And if we wanted to add new school emulators?

[tommyinajar]

No micro center around here....yet (plans in the works) I might be able to get parts here from one my buddy lives near one but back on topic.

I have only noticed some success on the more difficult CHDs to be run, "working" on an i5 and up and was curious if the AMD deal above would have close to equal results. Also the running the newest VP stuff.

[redbeard30]

Well I have a minipin cabinet running VP at 1920x1080 with a 3.0 dual core, amd, overclocked to 3.3
98% of 200 tables run great, but to run VP at that resolution requires a vid card with 1 gig of memory, also has to be around a gtx250 or better. But I think desktop tables require a little less specs. I may pickup the microcenter deal myself.

[Dazz]

I just picked up an AMD FX6100 6-core @3.3, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 mobo and 12gb of DDR3 2000 for $350 for my new MAMEcab.

[tommyinajar]

I just picked up an AMD FX6100 6-core @3.3, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 mobo and 12gb of DDR3 2000 for $350 for my new MAMEcab.

\ Was that a combo deal from Microcenter?

[Blanka]

The dual cores often have much more headroom to overclock.

[Dazz]

I just picked up an AMD FX6100 6-core @3.3, Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 mobo and 12gb of DDR3 2000 for $350 for my new MAMEcab.

\ Was that a combo deal from Microcenter?

Nah, picked out separately via Newegg.com.

[tommyinajar]

This combo doesn't look too bad. $249 Should work good for the price-

1x    BIOSTAR TA990FXE AM3+ AMD 990FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
1x    AMD FX-6100 Zambezi 3.3GHz Socket AM3+ 95W Six-Core Desktop Processor FD6100WMGUSBX

Mobo got good reviews

 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.815414

[Readen]

how did the fx perform on tekken tag i want to now- cus i want to build a pc for mame whit a fx 4100 3.6 Ghz

[paigeoliver]

Honestly it doesn't make much sense to overclock anything anymore.  Small amounts of overclocking will be unnoticeable outside of a benchmark and large amounts of overclocking require almost as much money in extra cooling gear as they save (and it puts everything at risk).

Yes, overclocking generates more heat and more heat means a higher chance of hardware failure due to heat.

Even if you did overclock it is very unlikely that it would even move a single emulation title that you actually cared about out of the realm of unplayable into the realm of playable.

general question:  If someone is going to put a dedicated PC inside a real arcade machine, does it make sense to overclock it? Doesn't overclocking generate more heat?  And unlike a PC that sits on top of your PC, isn't the inside of an arcade machine create a lot less air flow and higher chances for hardware failure due to heat?

[Endprodukt]

Is mame STILL using only 2 cores?

[brad808]

Honestly it doesn't make much sense to overclock anything anymore.  Small amounts of overclocking will be unnoticeable outside of a benchmark and large amounts of overclocking require almost as much money in extra cooling gear as they save (and it puts everything at risk).

Yes, overclocking generates more heat and more heat means a higher chance of hardware failure due to heat.

Even if you did overclock it is very unlikely that it would even move a single emulation title that you actually cared about out of the realm of unplayable into the realm of playable.

I have to dissagree with all of this minus the part about overclocking generating more heat. All of my cabs are overclocked and can run for 48 hours + with all cores being utilized 100% and still run at temperatures within the heat specifications of each cpu. The most I would personally leave my cabinets on would be overnight after a drunken party so I have no fear about overheating considering I could technically leave them on 24/7 without problems. My driving cabinet is a dual core overclocked from 2.4ghz  to 3 ghz (making the cruisn games playable, as well as model 3 emulator which is cpu heavy and wasn't running full speed) on stock fan simply by changing a few specs in bios and running some overnight benchmarks. No extra money required and probably collectively 2 hours spent at the machine tweaking settings in between benchmark runs.

For my other overclocks all I have purchased is cpu fans. Most of the time you can get a top end cpu fan for around $30 which will allow for huge heat reduction (more overclock room). In my case I have a $70-80 cpu and spending a few bucks on a cpu fan, and again probably 2 hours tweaking, I was able to make maybe 15-20 high quality games that I wanted to play work 100% like nfl blitz, the new cave sh3 shmups (6 or 7 awesome new games), mr driller, tekken tag/ tekken 3, mace: the dark age, soul calibur, and I'm sure others that are slipping my mind right now.

In my eyes when you see how easy it is and how little it actually takes it makes no sense not to do it. When you can have a cpu that cost $75 perform at the exact same specifications as a cpu that cost $150 just by changing a couple of settings and running some benchmarks overnight. As long as you do it properly you aren't pushing your cpu to any thing it isn't capable you are simply manually entering the correct values for that particular cpu to operate at its highest potential. Its lazy not to do it!!!!

[paigeoliver]

No, you pretty much proved what I said, you are getting a 25 percent speed boost, which is something that isn't really noticeable outside of a benchmark.  It is an absolute miracle if that just happened to push your system over the edge needed to play a few titles.

"Back in the day" overclocking could save you $500 on a system. I just don't see the point when it is saving me $75.

[bleargh]

"Back in the day" overclocking could save you $500 on a system. I just don't see the point when it is saving me $75.

I'm with ya paigeoliver... when overclocking could save me more than a couple of hundred bucks, it was worth tweaking the piss out of my PCs to get every single ounce of juice they could deliver.  Nowadays, the time I spend tweaking it is going to cost me more than if I were to just buy the faster CPU to begin with.

But heck... I used to be dropping ~$4-5k on a workstation PC every second year.  Think I spent $1200 on my current machine, ~3yrs back, and I'm still happy with it.  One of my other machines died earlier in the week and I'd poked my nose out to see what it'd cost to put a new one in its place.  For around $1000 I could get a quad-core w/32GB RAM, and just move over the HDs out of the dead one.

With prices like that, its not even worth my trying to diagnose PCs when they die any more... replacement parts for my old one would run me a couple of hundred bucks, or for a few hundred more I could replace it with something 4x as fast, and with 8x the memory.

Lol.... then again, I'm an old fart... I remember blowing $500 on a 500MB drive and thinking I got a steal of a deal.  Better yet... I remember spending $400 to add 4MB of memory ($100/MB) to my workstation back in the 90s.  And no, lets not talk about the gajillions of dollars I'd spent in years earlier...

[brad808]

No, you pretty much proved what I said, you are getting a 25 percent speed boost, which is something that isn't really noticeable outside of a benchmark.  It is an absolute miracle if that just happened to push your system over the edge needed to play a few titles.

"Back in the day" overclocking could save you $500 on a system. I just don't see the point when it is saving me $75.

But it is noticable. This is the point I want to let people that are interested in overclocking know. It's not just benchmarking its actual games that did not work at stock speeds and do work now after an overclock. In my case it made a lot of games playable that otherwise wouldn't be. Games that I want to play and are part of my "regulars". A lot of brand new expensive cpus at stock clock speeds still can't play nfl blitz. There aren't any normal consumer chips yet that come stock at 4ghz or more and yet it can so easily be achieved with overclocking. It isn't about how much money you save its about how much you can gain by a couple hours of your time and adding a fan. If the games that you play don't require overclocking then fine, clearly it won't be for people that don't care about games past the 90's. Obviously if people are asking about overclocking then they do care about those extra games and in that case it's definitely worth the extra say $30 to buy a cpu fan and get those extra games running.  My cpu fan has paid for itself in drunken blitz games with my friends a few times over I'm sure  .


As far as the whole spending 5-6k on machines I think people are past that. My dad showed me a receipt a little while ago for the $6000 Tandy 1000!!! Thats just an unfair comparison though because people thought those machines were going to last forever. Now I think most people,not the hardcore guys just consumers, realise everything is so outdated and useless in a few years that they aren't ever dropping that kind of cash on electronics anymore, tvs, computers, stereos. Everything has to be made cheap and throw away.

[brad808]

Isn't overclocking just a matter of changing like 2 settings now?  How is this possibly taking you guys hours upon hours?  Even I managed to do it recently.

Yea it really is stupid simple now. The only part that takes long is just leaving it overnight to run programs that ensure its stability and temperature. Then most people will do that a few times to tweak things a bit further and get the optimal settings.

[bleargh]

Isn't overclocking just a matter of changing like 2 settings now?  How is this possibly taking you guys hours upon hours?  Even I managed to do it recently.

Yea it really is stupid simple now. The only part that takes long is just leaving it overnight to run programs that ensure its stability and temperature. Then most people will do that a few times to tweak things a bit further and get the optimal settings.

brad808, I think you just made my point... "leave it overnight", and, "do that a few times to tweak things and get optimal settings".

That takes time, and if its time where I'm not able to be 100% confident that the machine is rock stable, that's time I'm not able to sit at it and do work.

Compare that to "I spent an extra $75, and it took me zero additional time".  IMO, that makes it a no-brainer; I'm spending the extra $75 on it.  When I was younger I was happy to spend hour after hour twiddling the settings and tweaking it to get it just right, but I ain't got that kind of time any more.  Well, I've still got the same 24hrs in a day as I did before, but I'd rather be spending my time doing other things than sitting here tweaking a PC.

[brad808]

brad808, I think you just made my point... "leave it overnight", and, "do that a few times to tweak things and get optimal settings".

That takes time, and if its time where I'm not able to be 100% confident that the machine is rock stable, that's time I'm not able to sit at it and do work.

Compare that to "I spent an extra $75, and it took me zero additional time".  IMO, that makes it a no-brainer; I'm spending the extra $75 on it.  When I was younger I was happy to spend hour after hour twiddling the settings and tweaking it to get it just right, but I ain't got that kind of time any more.  Well, I've still got the same 24hrs in a day as I did before, but I'd rather be spending my time doing other things than sitting here tweaking a PC.

Well of course anyone could argue that their time is worth x amount of dollars and that something isn't worth it to them. That's going to be different on an individual basis and how much free time or money they actually have. The same argument could be made though that if someone didn't have a lot of free time and like tinkering and customizing they wouldn't be on a website about building their own arcade controls to play outdated video games  Besides for me there has never personally been any time that I've spent sitting working at my arcade machine, all my work is done on other computers.

There is no point being fixated on the fact that "your saving $75" just because I started with a "crappy cpu", my point was just that I was able to achieve the same performance of a higher grade/ higher price point cpu quite easily out of the lower price/ lower grade cpu. Would it make you feel better if I said I took a $300 cpu and made it perform like a $600 cpu? Or $500 cpu perform like $1000? Then you would save $500  . There are a lot of people that do that and can get extreme overclocks but I'm not really into that. I wouldn't call myself good at overclocking at all actually.

Before the cave shooters got released my main mame machine was running at stock clock. Installed the new cave games, saw that they were kickass and realised my computer wasn't fast enough to run them. Ended up buying cpu fan, did some tweaks and the games became playable. Once I saw the clear performance gain on those games which took them to running 100% I went back to the list of games I removed due to them stuttering through performance and was able to find a bunch more that were now working 100%

Again it's not for everyone, I get it. For me definitely worth it. I've spent far more time playing the games that became playable, then I ever did adjusting bios settings to achieve the playability.

[pinballjim]

Or just push it to like 75% overclock boost and stop worrying about optimizing.  That's what I did.  10 minutes.

[Diet_Pepsi]

Or just push it to like 75% overclock boost and stop worrying about optimizing.  That's what I did.  10 minutes.

What he said.

[Haze]

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=297759

Even the top end AMD chips are incomparable on a mhz for mhz basis, a much lower clocked current gen intel will vastly outperform them in single core performance.

You have been warned.

Factor in that the Intels are usually easy to overclock even further than the AMD could ever dream of, and it's a bit of a no-brainer.