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.