Twist on the PIII question

[shorthair]

Put this in another thread but thought it might get a better see this way:

My dad gave me a PIII from his work. It has 512 mb ram. It has an AGP x4 port where I could use a 64MB radeon I have (or upgrade to 128 or 256 or arcade vga). There's someone local selling a 2.8 P4 for 40 bucks...could I replace the PIII with this and have a functional machine for current MAME?

[RayB]

Yes.

[mountain]

Are you talking about replacing the processer from a P3 to a P4 on the same motherboard? You need to research what socket you currently have on the motherboard. It is more than likely a socket 370 and I don't believe they made P4 processors for that socket.

[thennomeking]

I think the best you can do is powerleap from P3 to Celeron 1400:
http://www.powerleap.com/PL-iP3T.jsp
Granted getting one will be a trip.

[FrizzleFried]

A PIII 933 is faster than that Celeron 1400.  That PIII should likely be able to handle most of what MAME has...minus CHD's and some of the more fancy fighters of late.

[shorthair]

Mountain, yeah, that's what I was wondering.  FF, well, I only had a 64mb AGP card to try on it, but it was passable using .69, with games like Black Tiger....but I'd prefer not to have to play the poor person's mame, so to speak.

[thennomeking]

That is true Frizzlefried, but he never mentioned 933, so I took a shot at the lowest it would think it to be, a 500.  Granted the powerleap would cost about as much as buying a new pc off the shelf...they are neat though.

And your "poormans mame" rig should be able to play most, if not all, NeoGeo games on NeoRageX.  Mine does plays up to KoF2004 with no problem.

[FrizzleFried]

It would likely be cheaper to find a PIII 933 than anything else and it SHOULD handle most of MAME without issue...the PIII chip was actually more similar to the new Intel Chips than the PIV...the first PIV's that came out at 1200-1500mhz were actually slower than the PIII 933 as the PIII design did more "work" per processor cycle than the PIV...close to the AMD XP design as far as amount of work per cycle is concerned.  They changed the design for the PIV because the PIII design was creating too much heat (at the time) and couldn't be ramped up much more than 933mhz.  There ARE actually 1GHZ PIII chips,  but they are few and far between and they run hot hot hot...

As cheap as a PIV motherboard / CPU can be had 2nd hand (likely less than $100 for both for a 2.4ghz+),  that still probably the better option... and I do believe the memory is different between the two though (i THINK the PIII used standard SDRAM while the PIV uses DDR SDRAM...I could be wrong...my PIII 933 was the last Intel box I ever put together...personally, i'd AVOID the PIV...the design sucks...but that is personal opinion...an AMD XP2100 & MB can be had cheap as well and is much preferred over the Intel counterpart IN MY OPINION...but I am more of an AMD fan than Intel).

[shorthair]

the...: like I said, it didn't work easily for me, and the computer was running nothing else.  Granted, I haven't gone down the tinyxp path, yet, and that could make a difference.  But I'm a little leary of messing around with OS's and all that. Just messing around with programs and stuff within them often hasn't taught me much and given me a lot of grief.

FF: my PIII is a 733. As for AMD versus Intel, I don't know. There's people on both sides.

I think I'm going to have someone build me something. Hate to waste the free computer, but I'd rather spend some cash and have a sure thing with an eye to the future.

[Encryptor]

That P4 2.8Ghz chip will not work in that PIII board. They use a different socket.

Encryptor

[Dmod]

I'm using a PIII 933 MHz now.  The performance is highly dependent on the Mame version.  The newest versions of Mame (above v102) are slow.  I posted some results in a different thread.  I've seen good performance using earlier versions of Mame (v67 for example).  I've also seen performance boosts using fastmame.

It's still not fast enough for a lot of the newer games but I'm curious how many more games actually become playable if you step up to the PIV.  I know you'll be able to run more recent versions of Mame but I'm not sure that translates to a much higher level of playability.

[shorthair]

Thanks Encryptor.  I thought not, but thought I'd ask.

Dmod: my original computer is a 1.8 P4 and I have no trouble running any game up through at least the mid 90s with .106.  Even the new video scheme it's fine with if I have a high-memory card installed, as the integrated memory can't handle the version 9 bi-linear filtering.

[thennomeking]

FrizzleFried your preaching to the choir about xps and P3s being better than P4s, the only reason I have any P4s is one was given to me in pc form, an HP at that... and the other was also given to me, a SLW6K - which will eventually be added into a mamerig.  But I believe AMD has slipped up against the Core2duos, but I am in a catch22, Nvidia fan.  Granted my legacy windows box has a voodoo 3 and my soon to be mame cab has a Ati Rage Turbo Pro AGP 1.0 card...

[diverdown]

WHAT THE.....?



I have a computer. Its old. It runs mame ok