Which processor? PIII or Celeron?

[LeedsFan]

My dedicated Mame cab will be for classic games mainly.... Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaxian etc.   But there are a few newer games that have taken my fancy, like Metal Slug 3 and the 19xx games.  I'm not bothered about the .chd games as they are way too processor hungry.

I've set myself a minimum spec of a PIII 500Mhz system with about 128Mb of Ram and a 20Gb drive. I went to a local computer fair today to check out 2nd hand prices. PIII 650s were about

[Silver]

Hi,

At the same clock speed, a pentium 3 is significantly faster than the celeron (i.e. a 800Mhz P3 is faster than a 800Mhz Celeron). However, the Celeron was vastly cheaper - not sure how much nowadays.

a 900Mhz Celeron will be faster than a 650 Mhz P3, I'm estimating, at most day-to-day tasks. However, there will still be some specific tasks that may better suit the P3.

Either will play all the classics in mame with no problems at all. Newer games is much harder to guage, as they tend to get slower with new Mame versions (as emulation accuracy is increased).

However, I believe metalslug will play fine on a 900Mhz P3 and I imagine on a Celeron 900Mhz too. I would recommend though getting more memory than 128meg. A lot of neo-geo games (e.g. metal slug series) use loads of ram, and you will find having 256megs of ram (or more preferably) probably more helpful than a faster processor. Especially if you are planning on Windows XP.

[Gunstar Hero]

My experience with emulators is the faster, the better. Even if you just want to play mostly classics, I'd still suggest getting a faster machine. That way when you do want some newer games, you won't be underpowered.

[krick]

The "Tualatin" celerons really kicked butt...

http://www.geek.com/procspec/intel/pentium3tualatincel.htm

[Trenchbroom]

Unfortunately, a Celeron 900 is not a Tualatin but a Coppermine.  And they sucked as a normal computing CPU solution.  A PIII or Athlon 700 or a Duron 750 was much faster.

That said...for a MAME machine only I wouldn't have any problems with the Celeron.  Go cheap in this case.