Hardware for new MAME Build (pc)

[jcuticchia]

I have spent a lot of time trying to figure this out.  I am building a MAME system and want to run things smoothly.  I will be using a LCD (32 inch) and a cabinet built to accept Xarcade Tankit.

I just can't figure what pc components to get.  I have a Nvidia 1050-2g I would like to use.  But I don't know if I need the 8/9 gen i5 to build this, or can get something less powerful.  In other words I wan't the most most modern machine to do this without overkill.

Any assistance will be more than greatly appreciated!

[maliusmaximus]

Hi there mate, welcome to forums.
First of all, disclaimer, I'm only building my first cab but its based on about 1 year research and intensive looking into things.

The thing to note with Mame is that its an emulation environment. You're creating a virtual machine, which means the graphics card is not used at all in the traditional sense beyond passing through the output. The CPU  *might* offload some functions but the card is not doing any rendering.
What's most important therefore is the unmber of clock cycles of your machine.
Now I don't know this bit for certain, but I suspect that say a 4ghz gen 8 core i5 may perform better than say a 3Ghz gen 10 core i7. You probably don't need the processing complexity per clock cycle at this level.
The emulation will run on a single thread, so less cores at a higher speed may benefit an emulation environment more than a higher number of more complex cores and overall lower clock speed
There may be an article out there that actually benchmarks this, but my guess is that a fast core iAnything will be hella fast, and it will all be about keeping your bckground processes lean.

In this context as well, a discrete graphics card will make minimal difference in a Mame environment. Use it if you have it, it will help, but just remember that its the CPU that will be doing the heavy lifting. 

[mahuti]

There is a very similar post that was started in the last week or so. http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,164155.0.html

Short answer: fast as you can afford