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need a little help choosing a cpu

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elpresidente:
If you're truely budget conscious I recommend the Celerons.  The Celerons now are the P4's of last year. I have a 2.4 celeron (400Mhz fsb - the new ones have 533 fsb). Bought it with budget in mind and haven't regretted it. I work for a computer service company and we sell alot of celerons. They are solid chips. They can run most 3d games. Doom3 is rough on it, but it runs fine at 640x480. Another reason I like the intel products is that they will not burn up on you. If you put this in a cabinet, how are you goning tell if the cpu fan goes out? With a p4 the pc will slow down, a celeron will shutdwon and an athlon will burn up. Plus you get a 3 year warranty on the intel chips.

Just my 2 cents worth.

elvis:
I wouldn't recommend Celerons nor Durons for MAME usage.  They have much lower L2 cache levels than their bigger brothers, which is something that MAME really doesn't like.

I whole-heartedly recommend sticking with AthlonXP or P4 chips.  Semprons aren't bad (they have the same cache as the old 1500+ AthlonXP chips), but aren't great either.

In code like emulation where similar instructions are being repeated over and over, L2 cache helps things move along very nicely.  Stripping that away will leave you with quite a bottleneck.

Dexter:
If you get your hands on a P4 2.8c and a suitable motherboard you can overclock it BIGTIME and get an excellent price/performance ratio. Make sure it's the 'c' model (northwood) as the newer 'prescott' cores run too hot for decent overclocks with stock coolers.

My studio box currently double as a mame machine, it's overclocked to 3.5GHz and runs stable with standard memory and cooler. If you want to go with this option, check out theoverclockers.com.au forum. They're extremely helpful and theres loads of info on a good cpu/mobo combination for cheap overclocks.

Dexter

Todd H:
I just purchased a motherboard/AMD Duron 1.6 ghz combo from Outpost.com for $39 and it plays everything up to the Midway games like Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam full speed with no dropped frames.  So yes an AMD Duron will perform well with MAME as long as you're not planning on running the latest CHD's.

SOAPboy:

--- Quote from: Dexter on January 13, 2005, 06:57:50 am ---If you get your hands on a P4 2.8c and a suitable motherboard you can overclock it BIGTIME and get an excellent price/performance ratio. Make sure it's the 'c' model (northwood) as the newer 'prescott' cores run too hot for decent overclocks with stock coolers.

My studio box currently double as a mame machine, it's overclocked to 3.5GHz and runs stable with standard memory and cooler. If you want to go with this option, check out theoverclockers.com.au forum. They're extremely helpful and theres loads of info on a good cpu/mobo combination for cheap overclocks.

Dexter

--- End quote ---

id go ahead and have to say

DONT bother overclocking it..


Why you ask? because, the guy had to ask about which one to buy, this leads me to beleive its not in his best interest to start jacking with fsb settings..

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