PC have enough juice?

[jugger18]

I am building a mini (Tiny Pilot clone) arcade mainly for the kids.  It will run mostly MAME with maybe NES/SNES.  Will an amd fusion e350 apu (with a discrete graphics card) have enough power?

[Benzinbruder]

Depends on your components.

E.g., the new nvidia 750 Ti cards are known to consume much less power than the older comparable cards.

You gotta check your equipment.
In any case, if you're not aiming for minimal power consumption, I'd say you should at least opt for a 400 W or 450 W power supply.

[kevvy2006]

Hey Jugger,

Really depends on space needs, as benzinbruder said what graphics card are you using or are you going to use the on board video?  Are you going to be running a front-end (such as hyperspin?) because there may be restrictions there also.  I have built a few computers into NES's so i am quite familiar with a small form factor.  If you give me a better idea of what you are looking to do I can give you some ideas of what boards are better (of course if you did purchase this already).

~Kevin

[Malenko]

450 is the minimum Id run on anything remotely modern. better to have too much than not enough, and the price is negligible.

[jugger18]

This is a PC I have on hand.  4gb of ram, The AMD fusion e350 APU is the CPU/graphics chip.  I would probably toss in a Radeon 5450 graphics card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813154019 is the cpu/mb

[DeLuSioNal29]

When you say "power" did you mean "strong enough to run your applications"?  Or Power consumption?  I'm guessing the former.

[pbj]

Remember 10 years ago when people used to deride those that ran all those dinosaur era 600 watt power supplies... what happened to those days...

[kevvy2006]

When you say "power" did you mean "strong enough to run your applications"?  Or Power consumption?  I'm guessing the former.

Great Question, I was assuming he meant enough CPU/GPU Power to efficiently run emulators.

If you are speaking about CPU/GPU power I would really need to know what you are trying to run besides emulators(are you running Hyperspin or some other Frontend?). 

If you are speaking about PSU power then I would ask you if there is a space concern?  Does a standard power supply fit inside your cab?

[jugger18]

Sorry.  Yes in the case i mean cpu/gpu power.  I would like to run a frontend, either MALA or Hyperspin (dont need the videos for each game).

[kevvy2006]

This should be just fine to run the front-end and the SNES and NES emulators. If you are using hyperspin you may have to turn off some of the theme features (this can be done in HyperHQ).  If you place a video card in there you will defiantly be more then fine.

So I would say...

Short answer: Yes

Long (and quite geeky) answer:

A good rule of thumb to figure out if a computer can run something is take the CPU/GPU power of the machine you would like to run and multiply it by 3 to 5.   If your CPU/GPU is greater then the answer then you most likely can run it (of course if there is an emulator for that particular system ) 

For example:

The NES had a CPU of approx. 1.79 MHz times that by 5 you would get 8.95 MHz

Remember all an emulator is, is a virtual environment containing the original OS of the video game system.  This is why sometimes you will need the "BIOS" from an actual system as you need the OS to play the game!

I am sure that is more info then you needed 

[jugger18]

Perfect.  Thanks.  I had this setup as an XBMC media center but with all my smart TV's having the Plex app it was no longer needed.  The MB is small and uses little power so it is a good fit for the mini cab.

[dkersten]

The only thing you need even 1/10th of that power for is going to be 3d rendered emulation, like Naomi games on Demul.  For games Mame can actually play, there are a couple that have 3d rendering that will run slow without decent CPU performance, like MK4, but for the most part, anything you will likely play will run just fine.  If a game feels slow, hold down the insert key (for mame) to see if you can run faster than the emulation is "supposed" to run..  If you are under 100%, then you need more CPU to run that game at a normal speed.  If you are at 400% while holding it down, then you have 4x the power needed to run it.  I doubt much of anything in mame will struggle on the machine you are using.

And keep in mind that while you might think a cpu that runs at 1.6ghz is not as fast as one that runs at 4ghz, it is far more dependent on the architecture than the clock speed.  The slowest current generation of desktop CPU is still far faster than even the fastest cutting edge stuff made 6-8 years ago. 

[paigeoliver]

You can install more than one version of mame if you are having trouble running a particular game at full speed (generally older versions of mame are faster than newer versions).