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NVIDIA ION: Has anyone built a cab with one yet?

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IceCold:

It's nice that the Ion platform includes an onboard 9400m graphics chip, HDMI capability, etc. but I doubt this will be any different for MAME than what's been on the market for the last year or so(see this motherboard for $80).  MAME performance is based on processor speed more than anything, and the onboard GMA950 of the board I just posted is plenty sufficient for MAME.

As far as what RayB posted, I'm not sure how the front side bus speed of this motherboard is a problem.  Yes, the Atom is only a 1.6GHz chip, and a slow one at that, but I hardly see it being lucky to play any games newer than 1990.  Mortal Kombat 3 should run on this board, and that's 1995.  NBA Jam TE will run, that's 1993.  I don't own a board with the Atom 330, but I do own a mini itx board with the atom 230(the 230 is a single core atom.  the 330 is the dual core), and even that board is at least comparable with a 2.4GHz Pentium 4.  So when you have a board with the 330(theoretically twice as fast as the 230, if the app takes advantage of it) it should be decent for MAME performance.  Probably won't be rocking out Killer Instinct with it, but it would be a great replacement for those with aging Athlon XP systems and Pentium 4's.  Draws a lot less power too, so you'll save on your electric bill, and your cab won't get as hot.

So, in short, the ion platform is cool, but save yourself ~$100 and just go for that motheboard I posted.  The MAME performance difference will be negligible.  If you'll be using it for any kind of PC games, though, or need HDMI or 6 channel audio, go for the Ion.

IceCold:

Hehe 2600 you posted right as I was typing my reply.  It's funny, you have the motherboard I linked in my post.

I think we're pretty much agreeing in our posts, though.   But yeah, the 400/533 is the front side bus.(to RayB - I can see how it would be easy to mistake that for the speed of the board when looking at the newegg page - I wasn't trying to be a jerk by pointing that out). 

MAME performance with the Atom 230 wasn't bad, so I figured the 330 would be even better(even if one were to use an older MAME version that doesn't support any type of multithreading, at least the one core can be handling background tasks so one core can be dedicated to MAME).

If anybody sees mine and 2600's posts, they were both within about a minute of each other.  I was just a little late.  :P

2600:

nbajam 115%


Also, changed the ini to skip_gameinfo and added multithreading.

dkong 171%
pacman 1566%

cmoses:

Can you explain what the skip_gameinfo and multithreading do more specifically?

Are they both turned on/off in the mame.ini ?

2600:

They are settings in the ini file.

skip_gameinfo skips the popup that displays info  (I assume that if I left it disabled the calculation would be off since it would start calculating at this screen)

multithreading turns on multithreading.  Since the Atom has 2 CPU's plus 2 HT CPU's I thought I'd try it.  I know some of the video output stuff is multithreaded and some of the bigger games are, but I'm not sure what else is.


Also, a thing to note about the other commands that I am running.  This purely tests the CPU.  Video and Audio are turned off and would actually add to the load if enabled.  For example, I removed those commands and reran pacman with sound and video in a window at a resolution of 240x240 and it ran at 849% and dkong was at 124%.

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