Resources and Heating Issues

[ever1458]

I'm in the process of building my first cabinet and this forum has been a great source of information, but I haven't been able to find any recent information on system resources. I am currently running an AMD Athlon 2700XP with 1GB of RAM and an ATI 1550 Videocard. Now I've read that the majority of MAME performance depends on the processor and I have to admit that after installing mame and mala my performance on a lot of games (even 2D sprites) has been pretty disappointing so I am thinking of upgrading my CPU. Could someone recommend a good CPU for running the latest version of mame with a FE. I am trying to get the most performance possible for under $200 for the CPU so I am leaning toward the Intel core 2 duo 8400 since it is a dual core 3Gz processor. Is it worth the extra money to go quad core? Is mame optimized for dual core or quad core? Also will I see a performance gain if I run a 64bit OS/mame versus a 32 bit OS/mame? I'm thinking about running 64bit Vista instead the 32bit XP I am currently running.

Also, how do you guys combat heating issues inside of the cabinet? My current CPU runs at 50C, but when i put it in the enclosed arcade cabinet, it quickly jumped to 93C! Obviously this is way too hot, so I was wondering how some of the boardmembers here deal with keeping your CPUs cool while the pc is in the cabinet.

[SirPeale]

What games are you trying to run?  That setup should be good for quite a few (most) games.

[deadsoulz]

I am running a Core2Duo chip and 64bit xp,  and 64bit compiled mame.  I am seeing some good performance gains.

[ever1458]

Games like Jurassic Park(1994), Mark of the Wolves, and in the not to distant future I'd like to run some Sega Model 2 games(Daytona USA).  When I was running 64 bit Mame on my primary PC which is a Intel e6700 dual core, Mark of the wolves ran at 100% and jurassic park was very playable. On the XP2700 Mark of the Wolves runs at 80% while Jurassic park is around 30% which means its not really even playable.

Deadsoulz -- you mean you are getting performance gains over 32bit mame, a single core processor or both?