Processor Advice

[jonnik]

About to start my first MAME build and shopping about for processors would Intel i3-550 Core i3 Dual-Core Processor -3.20GHz be suitable to run MAME ?

[nitrogen_widget]

well,
what games do you want to run?

[jonnik]

Most things up until end of 90s I would think ... possibly looking at adding some emulators like dreamcast to it as well if possible.

[jonnik]

I should perhaps put a bit more detail.

this will be my first MAME build and I am looking to play 2d possibly some 3d games NFL Blitz if I can but thats not important.

Was also thinking about running SNES PSX possibly Dreamcast emulators as well but that is not as important as MAME for me.

I have been looking at the above processor was wondering if that would have sufficient juice to run it, any advice on motherboard or other hardware would be appreciated also.

Additionally its likely I will use a flat screen as my monitor I have been told there may be some software i need to run to get the games looking like they did originally ! any advice on any of the above will be greatly appreciated.

[pbj]

Buy the most expensive Intel processor you can afford.

Make sure you remove all network functionality from your MAME cabinets.  People have gone to prison for their ROM collections.

[jonnik]

I have been told the quad core would be overkill is that not right ?

That is why I looked at the I3 money is not an issue but dont want to overspend on stuff that I dont need to at the same time. 

[keilmillerjr]

Yes, it should emulate even gauntlet over 100% on mame.

[Generic Eric]

Get a good motherboard.  You can always upgrade the CPU later.

Build the best PC you can afford to.   

[jonnik]

What motherboard would you reccommend ?

[dkersten]

mame can only take advantage of 2 cores currently from what I have read (although I have also read that you can set the number of cores it will use, but that it might still only use 2).  So a quad core cpu for mame is overkill, and usually means sacrificing 1 and 2 core performance.  However, there are only a small handful of games that really need the power.  Other emulators are a different story though.  Demul, for example, requires a monster 3d card to run games well, and while you don't need top of the line cpu power, it doesn't hurt.

I just got a new machine together with a 6 year old Core2Duo @2.4ghz, 4 gigs ram, and a Geforce730 GPU.  I haven't tried to run MK4 yet, but so far everything else runs at pretty much 100%.  I know from past experience that MK4 and a few others will struggle on this machine.  I also haven't tried firing up Demul yet to see if it will be playable, but the GPU is dx11 and will run it, just how well is the question..

Also bear in mind that your Front End potentially could be more demanding than your emulator. 

As for network, I would definitely remove network from it, but not because of copyright issues, rather because then you won't be getting notices for updates all the time.  You don't need updates for your OS if you aren't connected to the internet unless you have some kind of existing problem.

[jonnik]

Yeah I was not planning on having it as part of my home network its purely a gaming machine.

This is my first project thopugh and all this advice is really welcome, it will a lot of first for me including building a PC and I just dont want to make a complete hash of it.

the actually woodwork and building the control panel I should be comfortable with its teh hardware and software I need I am unsure of.

[dkersten]

Hardware isn't too big of a deal, just make sure to go with a discrete graphics card, preferably one with a little power and preferably something newer that supports directx11 if you intend to use Demul (pain in the butt otherwise).  I have heard that the newer Intel CPU's with the 4000 GPU built in do indeed work with mame in d3d mode and even run HLSL with no problem, but I have had issues trying to run mame with on board graphics a few times now (older machines).

I highly recommend you get the computer together first, figure out which front end you want to use, and start messing with it now.  I bet I have well over 200 hours into software setup now, and I could easily spend another 200 hours before it is where I would really like it to be.

Getting a FE working is usually pretty simple.  Getting mame working is usually pretty simple.  But getting all the artwork, cabinet pics, control panel pics, flyers, snapshots, videos, creating a custom layout, and making it all work together will take some time.  Then getting mame dialed in the way you want for your games will take some time.  Then getting your game list refined will take a LOT of time.  Setting controls up will take some time.  And once you get all that working the way you want, then you get to look at other emulators.  And once you have those running right, adding them to your front end can take a lot as well.  And that isn't even considering things like collecting CHD files, getting a control panel viewer to work, and compiling your own builds of mame.

And all of the above gets multiplied once you decide to add a new type of control (and hence a new type of game).  Add an aimtrak, and you will end up with many hours spent dialing it in on each game.  Add a wheel and you will spend many hours making it work for each game.. ETC ETC....

You can never start too early with software, and most likely after a year you will still not be done playing with it.

[jonnik]

Thanks for all the advice I will get the PC built and then am sure I will be back for software advice no doubt.

If I was to use a Intel i3-550 Core i3 Dual-Core Processor -3.20GHz, 4MB Cache, Socket 1156 what motherboard, graphics, sound and PCU would you reccommend ?

[dkersten]

Are you locked into that CPU?  Everything has migrated to the 1155 and 1150 sockets, it is hard to find 1156 socket based motherboards now.  Plus the latest generation of the core series draws nearly half the power of those gen2 core i processors.

I am a fan of EVGA motherboards and graphics cards.  You won't need anything special on the mobo like SLI compatibility or anything, so just pick from the least expensive for the type of CPU you get.. I have had good luck with ASRock motherboards lately too, good bang for the buck.  No need for anything more than built in audio.

As for graphics, the bigger the better but keep in mind that the bigger you go, the bigger your PSU needs to be.  For single card systems, a 600 watt is probably more than sufficient.  Unless you are anal about power draw, just get an 80+ and you will be fine.  If you stick to a sub $100 gpu you probably don't need more than 350-400 watts either.  I prefer NVidia over AMD.  The 740 would probably suffice for most games, but if you want a little extra juice jump to a 750ti, which will run just about any modern PC game as well as anything emulators can throw at you. 

If you want your Front End to run really well, and games to launch fast, go with an SSD for your main drive.  Prices are down so low that you can get into a half terabyte for pretty cheap any more, and the performance is worlds above any mechanical drive.   

[jonnik]

No not locked in at all its just one I was looking at I will keep looking, I been told asrock are decent will look further into that.

Thanks again for all the advice guys I will be sure to be back for more before the end of the build

[big10p]

My MAME box has a 3.2GHz i3. It's run everything I've tried at full speed, 1920x1080 res with HLSL on. HLSL is down to the GPU though, obviously.

[Generic Eric]

There are 3 things that matter when building a mame PC. 
1.) Budget
2.) How long do you anticipate this PC lasting you? 3, 5 or 10 years?  Budget more for a PC you want to last longer
3.) Budget

How about treating yourself to a new PC and just using your current PC for MAME? Maybe it needs some updates too?

Also, both CPUs you listed seem to be out of stock on new egg?  It looks like they date back to 2010 and 2012.  What is it you are buying? 

At this point, I should say that I am very much a fan of the MAME "insert year of the PC configuration."  MAME2014 is overkill, but will give you leg room as time goes on.   

Generally, the Venn Diagram of pc building is budget vs performance.  You could add a third circle to that of MAME, but I think it would be more appropriate to consider what is the best windows 7 PC I can build now.  MAME runs better on 64bit.

Also consider that win7 begins the dawn of EOS starting 01/15 ending in 01/20.  So really, you'll be building a WIN7x64 MAME machine.

About to start my first MAME build and shopping about for processors

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,121162.msg1285462.html#msg1285462
best bang for your buck get a intel i5 core 2500k with motherboard combo read about i have it and its amazing no hicups at all!!!

Read the above thread for MAME2012 PC

What motherboard would you reccommend ?

Re: motherboard something current.  Maybe even new this year.  But you don't have to go this way.  Especially if this is your first time building a PC.

Determine your budget and choose a small form factor PC from Dell.  Then, go about picking individual parts from newegg or amazon to match it.  You may save some money from not ordering a case.

run a 64-bit OS and 64-bit MAME which gives a significant boost
a decent clocked i5 is your current 2012 best bet for price/performance.

HLSL

TL;DR Get the cheaper CPU.

[screamingtiger]

Source?

Buy the most expensive Intel processor you can afford.

Make sure you remove all network functionality from your MAME cabinets.  People have gone to prison for their ROM collections.

[jonnik]

Thanks that helps, I think will shop about for a i5 then as I say money is not an issue budget is about £1000 at the same time didnt want to just waste money on bits that I dont need or is overkill for the job.

[jonnik]

Can pick up a 3ghz i5 1150 for about £100 at my local shop.

Will not skimp on motherboard and go from there.

What would you reccommend for the front end ?

[Generic Eric]

Can pick up a 3ghz i5 1150 for about £100 at my local shop.

Will not skimp on motherboard and go from there.

What would you reccommend for the front end ?

Pick one that has current support.  Really, all of them.  I thought Hyperspin was the hottest thing since bacon, but when I showed it to other people, they were not impressed.  Give mala a go first.  If you don't like it, keep looking, there are others.

Also, what is your use style?  Do you always leave the PC on?  Look for an overall low power usage PC. 

You can build however you want, but I wonder if you might be better off upgrading something you can find second hand?  If this is your first time building then maybe that is a better option.   

If this is your first PC build, first time configuring mame, and configuring front ends, and first time building something from would wood and you don't own any tools...

You can see how you might be setting yourself up for a long slog.  Which doesn't mean it won't be worth it, you might be setting yourself up for a long journey.

2 links before I finish:
http://mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php?title=Developer_WIPs
http://www.mamedev.org/devwiki/index.php?title=FAQ:Performance

Last two thoughts unless you specifically direct something to me.

How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time!

Do you know of the Paradox of My Grand Fathers axe? Short story short.  Something is going to change over the course of time with your set up. 

Keep asking questions & Good luck.

[yotsuya]

Source?

Buy the most expensive Intel processor you can afford.

Make sure you remove all network functionality from your MAME cabinets.  People have gone to prison for their ROM collections.

Source? His ass.

[lamprey]

mame can only take advantage of 2 cores currently from what I have read (although I have also read that you can set the number of cores it will use, but that it might still only use 2).  So a quad core cpu for mame is overkill, and usually means sacrificing 1 and 2 core performance.  However, there are only a small handful of games that really need the power.  Other emulators are a different story though.  Demul, for example, requires a monster 3d card to run games well, and while you don't need top of the line cpu power, it doesn't hurt.

I can't find a source to say if MAME will or will not use more than 2 cores, but it certainly appears to be using all the cores on my quad core setup (HT disabled). So, I wouldn't rule out a quad core, in fact, I'd rather have one. But, at the end of the day GHz seems to be king with MAME. The newer builds of MAME are slower for the demanding games, like Blitz. So, if you are on the cusp of running those, and you want to play them, try going back to an older build (0149 I think) and it should work better.

To the OP, If you have the money, then I'd get the fastest CPU to can afford. If you are comfortable with overclocking, I think the i5 "K" procs are great. However, the latest generation doesn't seem to have the overclocking headroom that previous generations had. So, it may not really be worth it to you. Also, a lot of the motherboards have overclocking functionality built into them. I've never seen them work as well as hand over clocking, but for the convenience they seem to work decently.

All that having been said, I'm not sure it helps you very much. But, just about any modern machine with half-way decent specs is going to be able to handle just about anything MAME can throw at it.

[screamingtiger]

I disagree with getting the latest stuff.  Buy "recent" cheapr stuff.

What happens is that hardware is the most expensive when it is new.  then it goes through a very cheap phase, until it is phased out.  Then the price starts going up again as it gets more rare.
Buy the stuff that is in the cheap zone now.

Older i3/i5/i7, athlon II, Phenom quad are starting to go back up in price.  But still can be had cheap.  My research stopped at socket AM3 as that is the last time I bulit a PC, when AM3 was the latest and greatest.

My Athlon II tri core overclocked to 3.4ghz plays everything I have tried so far.  Wii is a bit shakey but the emulators are not very old.  But really no need for that yet IMO.


Just my .02.

[dkersten]

I have always subscribed to the idea that overclocking is avoidable and not necessary under normal circumstances.  By all means if you are an enthusiast and love tinkering all the time, go for it.  If you want something to just plug in and work and last the life of the product, just get something that works for you in stock format and run with it.  The bump in performance is usually not worth the life you take off the product, at least to me it isn't.  And frankly an i5, particularly the last 3 generations of it, are more than fast enough for just about anything you can throw at it. 

The difference between a $200 motherboard and a $70 motherboard is usually A) number of pci-e 16/8x slots for SLI, B) number of high performance sata/usb headers, C) overclocking controls, and D) better heat pipes/sinks to cool all the extra crap.  Since SLI won't do anything for you, and you probably won't be running 4 Sata 6gbit/s drives, and overclocking for mame is kind of overkill, there is no need to get some crazy cutting edge motherboard.  Extra USB headers is nice to have but they don't need to be USB3.0, and most mobos, even cheap ones will have 4 headers (2 ports each) which is more than enough for most cabinets. 

A Gen4 corei5 with a basic motherboard, 4-8gb ram, an ssd, and a moderate GPU like a 740 will get you way under that budget and run it all without a hiccup.  If you really want to blow more money, bump the card up to a 750ti or 760, get a bigger SSD, a bigger PSU, and maybe bump the CPU up to the top i5.  The last 2 gaming rigs I built were right at $1000 usd and while not bleeding edge by any means, perfectly competent gaming computers that could play anything on the market at 1080 with some decent options turned on.  An extra $500 gets you 5-10% more overall performance over what it could do, and an extra $1000 on top of that will get you another 5%.  After that you might get another 3% overall but it will push you into the $5k range to get it.  The returns just aren't worth it to me.  Your money though.

[keilmillerjr]

Read my benchmarks here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,133583.msg1376327.html#msg1376327

Basically, I just went with a current but cheap i3 and motherboard combo from newegg.com and it ended up being more than enough for mame. I'm happy, and I didn't have to spend a lot to do it.

[jonnik]

Yeah i5 ordered 3.4 MHz with the 1150 sockets
Will look further into motherboard tomorrow but will get something recent, even though first time building a PC I know how to do it in theory and feel farely confident.

I feel the biggest issues for me will be software based I feel, I need to research what to use on the front end then how to get all emulators to run and how to configure both joysticks and the track ball to all the games.

The advice on here been helpful though, this was always going to be a long project 6 / 9 months I planned my time is limited due to work anyway so just have about 5/7 hours a week I can work on it at present.

I have a good idea about PC now I think so going to order the bits in and get building then the real headache will begin

[jonnik]

Ok processor bought Intel Core i5 3570 3.40GHz Socket 1155 6MB L3

Now to the processor

[InfantSorrow]

I run everything fine on an core2duo E7400 with 4 gigs ram and a geforce 9600. Old ass pc but it runs everything i give it smoothly even with HLSL.
Mame / Demul / Sega Model 2 emulator games run smooth. The CPU is slightly overclocked to 3ghz though but that doesnt make much of a diff.