How's Mame run on a 3.2GHz P4???

[Pasqualz]

I'm getting a great deal from a friend on a Dell Inspiron 4600 with P4 3.2GHz (400MHz bus & HT), 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 - 128MB vid card with TV out, and Soundblaster Audigy sound card. I'm planning on using this PC in my soon to be built MAME cab and wanted to know if anyone else uses a high-end PC like this for MAME. If you do, how do the newer games run?? I'm wondering if this is overkill and I should swap this new PC with my home office PC (P4 2.4, 256MB). Any comments???

[steve_pss]

Many games, say like Beserk, require at least 10Ghz Pentium 7 so you may want to upgrade a bit.

[Pasqualz]

LOL Steve! I'll wait until 2007 to build my Cab! I knew I'd get some snide remarks. Keep 'em coming guys!

[Jakobud]

Unless you need that extra horsepower for your desktop PC, I'd just use the fast one for Mame.  You won't have to upgrade it for quite a while.

[Sylentwulf]

I can easily run .chd's on a much lesser system. Use your desktop PC and add another 256-512mb RAM.

[DaveJ-UK]

I'm getting a great deal from a friend on a Dell Inspiron 4600 with P4 3.2GHz (400MHz bus & HT)

The 400Mhz FSB P4's only went up to 2.4 - certainly not 3.2

Also, only the 800MHz FSB Northwoods and Prescotts have HTT.

[pointdablame]

I'm getting a great deal from a friend on a Dell Inspiron 4600 with P4 3.2GHz (400MHz bus & HT)

The 400Mhz FSB P4's only went up to 2.4 - certainly not 3.2

Also, only the 800MHz FSB Northwoods and Prescotts have HTT.

*nods in a greement*  That's what I was going to ask about.  Your friend either has the FSB wrong or the CPU speed wrong.

[Pasqualz]

Dave & Point - Good spot on the 400 MHz front side! I made a Typo, it is an 800MHz front side bus!

[Tiger-Heli]

I'm getting a great deal from a friend on a Dell Inspiron 4600 with P4 3.2GHz (400MHz bus & HT), 512MB RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 - 128MB vid card with TV out, and Soundblaster Audigy sound card. I'm planning on using this PC in my soon to be built MAME cab and wanted to know if anyone else uses a high-end PC like this for MAME. If you do, how do the newer games run?? I'm wondering if this is overkill and I should swap this new PC with my home office PC (P4 2.4, 256MB). Any comments???

Basic Questions that come into play here -

Q1 - Have you tried MAME on the home office P4 2.4 256 MB PC?  If so, are there games that you absolutely love that it won't play?

Q2 - Are there non-MAME apps that you run on the home office PC would benefit from the speed increase of the P4 3.2 (assuming that info is correct).

Here's what I'm gettting at:  I don't have a machine that fast, but I think the Cruisin' USA series would need a serious game CPU underclock to be playable on the P2.4.  It would probably need a milder underclock on the P3.2.  Pretty much SF Rush and most of the really hot games will either play well on either system or not be playable on either system.

If Cruisin' is your favorite game of all time, you play MAME every spare moment, and you use the office PC for web surfing, writing letters, and tracking your budget in Excel - put the 3.2 in the MAME cab.

If Cruisin' is not that important to you, you do CAD design and also play serious PC games on the office PC, put the 3.2 in the office and put the 2.4 in the MAME cab.

Between these extremes, you have to decide which machine would benefit more from the speedup.