The better processor?

[GS12]

Hey folks, I'm going for a budget build PC to emulate games and much more. I'm looking to play the 3D games (California Speed, Soul Calibur etc.) and was wondering which processor would perform better with these games: an AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE (3.4 GHz), or an AMD FX-4170 (4.2 GHz)? Intel CPUs are out of the question. Thanks,
GS12

P.S. I know MAME doesn't utilize more than 2 cores, but since this is such a cheap build, I obviously don't plan on OC'ing.

[brad808]

I would think building on the cheap would be the exact reason people would want to overclock. That's why I do it. Take a cheap chip and boost the performance to that of a chip that cost a lot more and runs equally on stock clocks. Most of the time you can get away with a $20-$30 cpu fan and some time for tweaking.

Sent from my Desire HD

[BadMouth]

No experience with either of those processors, but I'm running California Speed a 90w 3.4Ghz Athlon X3 with DDR2 memory.
I'm using XP64 with all uneccessary services disabled, including networking. 
It took a bit of tweaking to get there, but it runs full speed with maybe one or two sound skips per game on the more demanding tracks.
If you're using a 64bit OS, the Phenom should be able to run it as long as you're not running antivirus and such.

The 4.2Ghz for the FX-4170 sounds great, but I've heard the newest generation of AMD processors are a bit of a let-down with MAME.

You might try the charts on tomshardware.com and see how they compare on single core tasks.