New mame pc cpu / os advice

[Hyperfan]

Hi

I know this has been asked many times but processers get out of date so much i thought i would ask again.

What the current best cpu for running the latest chd games full speed.

Is it worth going quad core? i see in one thread someone recomending duel core e8500 ?

I also want to run other emulators like the model2 emulator, is it a case of cpu power rather than ram and graphics card for all emulators?

Should i stick to xp or use windows 7 64 bit?

[Hyperfan]

Can anyone give me some advice on this please? I am now looking at an i5 processor, i think they compare to quad cores dont they?

[bkenobi]

If you want to play the latest and greatest at full speed, the rule is always the same.  Buy the best processor available and overclock it as far as you can.  At that point, you will be able to at least boot most if not all of the most recent games.  I don't even keep up with CPU's any more because they advance so quickly and cost so much.  I think you are currently looking at an i7 quad core overclocked somewhere north of 4GHz.

[mvsfan]

some people have great results with overclocking. my advice is to buy a slightly bigger cpu than you think you need and not overclock it. im going for reliability here, not speed.

If its cheap and fast, then its not reliable. if its reliable and fast then its not cheap.

[bigster]

It depends what games you wanted to play.  I have no experience with windows 7, I stuck with XP64 bit because it had so many FE's plus I wanted to play all the legacy dos games without a dos box. 

For the CPU, try this thread:

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=72776.0