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MAME and RAM vs CPU

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EmuHead:
Just about finished setting up my 1ghz athlon for use in a cab, overclocked it to 1.3 and it made LOADS of difference. My question is this - is it worth upgrading the RAM in this system? I currently have 128mb installed, and i know most say 512MB is good for mame these days but is it really worth forking out for that considering the CPU isnt all that powerful? I mainly want this for 2player fighting games but would hate it if i found a great game that wouldnt work well.

     -Shawn

(just checked my 0.88 rom download, its at 61%, cant wait!)

RacerX:
From everything I have ever read about MAME, CPU speed is *far* more important than RAM as far as the games running full speed.

As far as 128MB being enough, I'm not up on the latest versions of MAME.  I still run an older version.  So I'll let someone else answer that who is better acquainted with it.

Minwah:
It should make a big difference, I would think loading speed would increase for one.  If you can't afford to go to 512, why not try 256 first - I think that in itself would make a good difference.

calicyco:
How about on the flip side - is there some amount of RAM which would be a waste to use in MAME?

I was planning on using a P4 1.8ghz box with 2 gig RDRAM. Since this is the only box that can hold the RDRAM I can't really put it elsewhere, however I have an Athlon 2400+ which is 2ghz, but only has 768 mb of ram.

So, the Athlon is slightly faster cpu wise, but has a 266 FSB, which is much slower than the 800 FSB of the P4. So I have faster RAM bandwidth and more RAM on the P4, but a higher clock rate on the Athlon.

Which one would perform better? I haven't setup the P4 yet so I can't test it. Would 2 gig really help MAME, does it do heavy memory stuff?

Thanks!

paigeoliver:
Mame wouldn't even come close to touching your 2 GB of ram.

As for 128 Mb being "enough" it really depends on your operating system, system setup, and mame version (the big unpacked mame exe that you can compile uses a lot less memory than the normal one).

A poorly setup system running XP might use up 400 MB of ram just booting, while a super tuned win9x system might use up less than 20 MB, while DOS systems will use basically none at all (less than a MB).

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