Need advice on this PC set up please

[Apollo]

AMD Duron 1.6GHz CPU & Fan, PC Chips M825LMR Motherboard, 256Mb Adata PC3200 DDR400, Integrated Graphics (+ AGP Slot), Mid ATX Tower Case 300w, Integrated 56k Modem, Integrated Sound, Integrated 10/100 LAN

Arcade VGA card to go in AGP slot. I'll have to chuck some kind of hard drive in there as well.

Is this going to run my games ok?
Thankyou

[HaRuMaN]

It should

[Sephroth57]

yeah that should run everything except the CHD games.. which hardly any computers can run right now

[Pete Harcoff]

You should be fine.  I use a 1.7 GHz Celeron, 256 PC133 RAM, Geforce4 MX420 for my MAME games with no problems whatsoever.

[hulkster]

can somebody explain the difference in the duron/athlon/athlon xp.....besides the price?  is duron crappy or something?  ive never used amd and im probably going to get one for my new cab pc.  is there anything i need to know before buying amd?

[screaming]

can somebody explain the difference in the duron/athlon/athlon xp.....besides the price?  is duron crappy or something?  ive never used amd and im probably going to get one for my new cab pc.  is there anything i need to know before buying amd?

An Athlon is like a Pentium III. It's pretty old, but definitely good enough for MAME. You might run into issues if you wanted to play some decent PC based games though.

Athlon XPs are like Pentium 4s. Aside from the spankin' new Hammer 64 bit processors, they're the latest and greatest. A high megahertz version of this CPU class will run pretty much every PC game out there.

Durons are AMD's answer to the Intel Celeron.  I very highly recommend against going with either the Duron or the Celeron processor. They are the slimmed down versions of thier higher end counterparts (P4 and AthlonXP), and technology seems to run over them pretty quickly, meaning, all your applications will start getting slow slow slow a lot sooner then they would if you had an AthlonXP. Whether that matters as much in your arcade cabinet, well, that's your opinion. Personally, I'd spend the extra loot and get myself a real CPU

  Technically, Durons have 1/4th the amount of L2 cache as the AthlonXP, but also run a lot cooler (if that's an issue for you).

  Generally speaking, AMDs offer a better price over Intels, but tend to run hotter and have higher PSU (Power supply unit) requirements. In the marketplace, AMDs are sort of the Linux to Intel's Microsoft (they're the underdog).  So if you're into that evangelistic kind of thing, that's another reason to go with AMD

HTH.
/Steve

[Sephroth57]

AMD > intel        go underdogs!!!  

[CCM]

AMD Duron 1.6GHz CPU & Fan, PC Chips M825LMR Motherboard, 256Mb Adata PC3200 DDR400, Integrated Graphics (+ AGP Slot), Mid ATX Tower Case 300w, Integrated 56k Modem, Integrated Sound, Integrated 10/100 LAN

Arcade VGA card to go in AGP slot. I'll have to chuck some kind of hard drive in there as well.

Is this going to run my games ok?
Thankyou

I would stay away from the PC Chips motherboards!   They are crap!  I had one for about a week, it gave me nothing but problems!  

[Apollo]

Anyone else have concerns about the PC Chips motherboard? This is the last thing I need to buy to finish my arcade machine I don't want this to be an expensive mistake. I'm only running MAME, nothing else.

[menace]

My fiance's mom and sister both have the pc-chips with no problems--pro--they're cheaper, smaller, cons they're harder to find documentation and upgrades are limited.  if you're just going to pop on a processor and forget about it, it would be the easier cheaper route (root or rowte depending on where you live )

[Apollo]

Thanks menace, I'm going to order the system it's like half of what an Athlon or P4 would cost me. Thanks for everyones advice.

Nearly finished now, I can't wait to post pics of the finished MAME machine!

[ErikRuud]

That system is very similar to the one I just got from Tiger Direct.  So far I have had no trouble nad it runs every non CHD game that I have tried on it.  Mine has a Mercury KT266A motherboard.  For some reason mine inclded PC2100 SDRAM instead of the listed PC133 DDR.

[Sephroth57]

thats a decent setup erik, although you couldve got a little more bang for your buck if you went the pricewatch.com route and assembled your own, i just made up a full system that came out to about your price except i have a 2800xp athlon

[bionicbadger]

can somebody explain the difference in the duron/athlon/athlon xp.....besides the price?  is duron crappy or something?  ive never used amd and im probably going to get one for my new cab pc.  is there anything i need to know before buying amd?

A Dunron is WAY better than a celeron.  Here is article on low cost processors:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927

"It is very obvious from these tests which line of budget processors is worth the money. When we can find a 1.6GHz Duron for just over half the price of a 2.6GHz Celeron and get better performance consistently in almost every test we ran, the choice is clear"

Celeron is crippled by lack of cache.  Duron has less cache than athlon but more than a celeron, but because it has a different architecture (shorter pipeline) it still performs fairly well.

Everyone should read this article and tell people not to buy celeron computers.

[Apollo]

Cool, thanks Badge.

[hulkster]

okay, thanks for the info guys.  im wondering though, ive bought stuff from pricewatch before (well the sites that are advertised on pricewatch)....wouldnt i be better off just buying from newegg?  

also, the last time i bought a p4 processor, it came with a heat sink and i didnt have to buy any thermal grease.  will the amd ones come with the same thing?

[Trenchbroom]

PC Chips mobo-ugh.  Traditionally they have been horrible, but I haven't heard much about their recent boards.  For a long time you couldn't find them but now I see them flooding the market again.

If you want to see what PC Chips was all about a long time ago, check this out:

http://www.redhill.net.au/b-bad.html

I also recommend this site for anyone interested in the history of PC computing--fascinating read if you have the time.

[ErikRuud]

Seproth,

I was given $200.00 in TigerDirect gift certificates for Christmas.  I drove to their outlet and picked it up, so I saved the cost of shipping.

My final out of pocket is $79.00 plus tax!  Pricewatch can't touch that.