Upgrading cabinet, please help with CPU speed decision.

[MBison]

I'm upgrading my current cabinet.  My question is, what speed CPU do I need to emulate Killer Instinct 1/2 and Street Fighter EX/Plus games good?

They run fine on my PC gaming machine, a 3.0, but want to know what I can get away with slower than that (ie: cheaper!)

Thanks for any help.

[krick]

I'm upgrading my current cabinet.  My question is, what speed CPU do I need to emulate Killer Instinct 1/2 and Street Fighter EX/Plus games good?

They run fine on my PC gaming machine, a 3.0, but want to know what I can get away with slower than that (ie: cheaper!)

Thanks for any help.

You'll find that with each new version of MAME, the emulation gets more accurate.  So games that run fine on a 3GHz now, might not run good in future versions of mame.

Personally, I would put in the fastest processor I could afford.

To save some money on the CPU, you might want to think about getting a 2.4c P4 CPU and overclocking the fsb to 500.  This will give you a 3GHz proc.  This is what I run in my primary PC.

I was able to overclock the CPU using the stock intel heatsink/fan unit.

For stability, I decided to run my memory at the stock speed (not overclocked).

For what it's worth, I'm running an ABIT IS7-E motherboard...

$70 from M-Wave...
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/viewspec.hmx?scriteria=BA19334

If you go for a bundle, you can save a little more money...
get a 2.4c CPU for $152
and 1GB (2x512M) of DDR400 MWAVE brand memory for $142

$364 total.

[pointdablame]

KI ran fine on my Athlon 2100+ when I had it.  

Krick's suggestions are good, but you could definitely play it with a cheaper PC.

[Martoon]

One thing you can do to get a general idea if a particular game will work on a slower CPU is to run the game on your faster CPU, and hit F11 to show its running speed and F10 to toggle off speed throttling.  Then get into the actual gameplay where you have lots of sprites onscreen, etc., and see where your speed is at.  For example, if it's running around 200% speed, you'd need a CPU about half that fast to manage 100%, etc.  Of course, it's not quite that simple, since there's other factors at play (blitting speed to video, etc.), and a lower-end CPU is typically not just a slower clock speed than a higher end - it also does less per clock cycle.  But seeing the unthrottled speed on your faster machine will at least give you some kind of ballpark idea of how much CPU grunt you need.

But as Krick noted, if you get a CPU that's faster than what you need, you won't regret it in the future.