Main > Main Forum

900 mhz Celeron versus 800 mhz Pentium III - which one should I choose?

<< < (3/5) > >>

TheManuel:
You definitely should try both if you have them avialable.
I think the Celeron will be faster.

I tried a Celeron 700 and Pentium III 800 for my project and the PIII was not much faster than the Celeron above the expected 14% increase in speed.

If I'm not mistaken, Celerons are Pentiums with lower Level 2 Cache size.  This does does not improve your performance by more than 10%, if that.
Check out this article (although the tests were done on more recent hardware but the basic conclusion should hold).

As for the FSB.  It will not make a difference in MAME.  I tried both, 100 and 133 memory modules on my PIII 800MHz and could not extract a single fps from the upgrade.

MAME is very strongly dependent on CPU speed.  Anything else will have little or no effect.  There is too much anecdotal and "everybody knows" advice when it comes to making MAME run faster.  Not a lot of people have really done the tests themselves. 

The one true effective way to make MAME faster other than increasing processor speed is using an older MAME version.  Anything else, please show data.  I try do to do some myth busting on this subject every time I see someone asking on advice to improve MAME performance.

pressthebutton:
Thank you for the input guys!!

I´m about to test both processors and I´ll post the results here. I´ve just recieved arcadevga graphic card. First I need to build a vga to scart/rgb cable to test everything on the tv.



 :cheers:

DaOld Man:

--- Quote from: pressthebutton on December 29, 2007, 10:51:49 pm ---I was hoping to run a DOS Mame with a front-end. Will spystyle do the trick? I've read that many people are using win98 with a special command line config that allows Mame to run directly without loading windows.

Also I´ve got an old 8 gigas harddrive that I was hoping to use. Is that enough?


--- End quote ---

Game Launcher (GLaunch) works good in dos, and looks good for a front end, I think. (Download the DOS version.)
I had problems setting up my first machine in dos, so I just used win98, then later winxp. GLaunch works good in win98 too. (Download the windows version.)
But dont use mame32 with a frontend, you can, but its not really meant to be a command line mame.
If you run CMD in win98 (start/run/cmd), it will start up in dos each time the machine is booted after that, until you type EXIT.
So this may be what people are talking about?
8 gig will be enough, unless you have a lot of games. (remember screenshots take up a lot of space too.)
I suggest you set up a test computer on your workbench (kitchen table) and just try some things.
Looks like you are already headed that way.

Afterburner:
I'm using an old PIII 1GHz for my mame cabinet.

I'm running Mame32 v.110 or v.116 (forget which, maybe both!) without any real frontend....just the default mame32 interface.

I've got XP installed.  I didn't install TinyXP, but I stripped just about everything out I could and shut down anything I didn't need running.  And my graphics card is a poor PCI (not PCI express) card as the original was an intel integrated graphic chip that doesn't work with mame anymore.

It boots pretty fast....faster than it takes Mame32 to load, anyway.

I'm able to run just about any game I want to play with the exception of newer ones.  Starblade, HOTD, etc.  Any of those are too complex for it.

IG-88:

--- Quote from: TheManuel on January 03, 2008, 12:31:58 pm ---

......MAME is very strongly dependent on CPU speed.  Anything else will have little or no effect.  There is too much anecdotal and "everybody knows" advice when it comes to making MAME run faster.  Not a lot of people have really done the tests themselves. 


--- End quote ---

Just curious but would dual processors (as in 2 separate chips) help improve performance? I have an old server mobo with 2 400mhz cpu's on it and thought about trying it.

sorry for getting OT.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version