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Decent PC specs for MAME?

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BadMouth:
Think of the games in MAME as individual games.
What games are important to you?

MAME exists to emulate original hardware, not necessarily make games playable on your pc.
There are games in MAME that are emulated, but there isn't a powerful enough processor on the market to run them full speed.
You will never find a pc that will "run everything in MAME"

The PC you linked to can probably run 2D games up through Mortal Kombat 3, but not the 3D games like Tekken.
(It will probably run Tekken using a different emulator though - Zinc)
If you're only going to play classics from the 80's, spending any more will be a waste.

It becomes a case of diminishing returns where you are spending a couple hundred bucks more to make a half dozen more games playable.
I don't mind doing that for particular games, but you need to decide where to draw the line.

I have 3.4Ghz Athlon X3's in two of my cabs.  They can do the early 3D games like Tekken.  NFL Blitz is playable, but has some sound skips.
California Speed is playable on my driving cab, but it chokes hard on Ridge Racer. 
For other emulators like Demul and Supermodel, it's just enough.

brad808:
Get a cheap 2 core processor. Good bang for buck. P4s are too old now. You can find much newer processors used for like $20

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

kahlid74:
It's been covered by the others above but I'll give you the top end spec from what I've read before.  If you're looking to play NFL Blitz 99 you're going to need north of 9Ghz of processing power total.  Most people feel confident that a Core i5 at the 3 Ghz range is the minimum to play all MAME games including NFL Blitz, Gauntlet Legends and SF Rush.

rCadeGaming:
Ok, say you do want to run demanding stuff like Blitz, Rush, Cruisn', etc., and you want be to as future proof as you can with currently available processors.

AMD's with much higher advertised clock speeds than comparably priced Intels are readily available, but I've also heard that Intels can perform more actual operations per second with lower clock speeds than AMD's, so I'm still undecided.  What is the feeling on Intel vs. AMD for MAME? 

Also, I built my last PC with the idea that more than two processors is of no use to MAME.  Is this still true?

adder:
its interesting that some people say a P4 is still ok and others say its no good with the latest versions of mame

i imagine which P4 plays a part in it.. as my p4 651 HT cedar mill 3.4ghz 2MB L2 cache (the last of the P4's made) is just fine for all the games i love (ie. everything up to the 3d games/racers/the more intensive shooters)... and i did a comparision with my intel core2duo 2ghz and found that although the core2duo was better in performance, it was only slightly!

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