-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday 17 August 2004 23.52, henri wrote: > how much cpu power do you need for the newer chd gun games? > is 1ghz enough? Nope, forget the budget CPU's, if you will mostly be playing CHD games you should be looking at good well-matched hardware. Don't even think about VIA C3 type CPU's they may say 1Ghz, but for tasks such as XMAME even a P3 800MHz or an old GHz AMD Duron will outgun the C3, that said the VIA's make wonderful TV boxen =) but I digress. A cheap-ish set of good hardware would be for example:
- -Athlon XP (the best bang for the buck as I write this is the Barton version with the 2500 rating, this is unlocked for overclocking and most will run at a 2800 or 2900 rating without generating much more heat, a great CPU) Avoid the non-Barton versions as they run much hotter and are difficult to overclock. If you can't get the 2500, try to get one of the faster ones you might find a bargin anyways. appx: $50 - -A good quality dual path RAM motherboard, you can get nforce2 chipset MB's for very reasonable prices these days. Try to stick to a named brand such as ASUS, ABit etc.. though. Most of the better brands use the better south bridge nforce2 version which includes a passable 6 channel audio. Also the nforce2 boards will usually have at least 6 USB ports for devices. Other good chipsets are the later model VIA's but they tend to be a little more expensive on the sites I shop at. appx: $60-80 - -Reasonable RAM, this is the most expensive single part, you will want to have 512Mb, more is good but you wont want to have much less as 256Mb will be tight for some things. The best thing to do here is buy one of the mid-range brands such as TwinMOS or whichever is cheapest on the day. You'll want 2x 256Mb modules to take advantage of the dual channel feature, just make sure you plug the modules into the right slots to make it work. appx: $80-120 - -Get the cheapest MODERN hardisk you can find, there are no harddisks on the market these days that are slow enough to make a difference to MAME. That said, if you are going to be using your cabinet as a server too, you might want to splash out on a better/bigger disk. appx: $40 total appx: $230-300 I tend to add an extra 4 port USB card to my machines, its a small cost for the extra ports, usually cheaper than a hub =) Please share your comments with the list, especially if someone out there has another point of view about my choices. I'm always open to good discussion. For a MAME box, you don't need the best hardware, but starting out with good quality parts, you are much less likely to run into bottleneck problems with performance. And if you decide you need more CPU or RAM, you know you can safely upgrade a fair way without making the rest of the system unstable. > going the easy way (i hope). ordered a j-pac and arcadevga, > picking up a 19" jamma cab locally. gotta find a computer > for it now Good equipment and a good choice, I made my first cab the same way. I've decided that the cab I'm building now is going to be XMame but with an I-pac4 and a TV instead. Just waiting on the wood sheets to arrive now =) - -- /Anthony Whitehead Unix Sysadmin PGP Key: http://www.solace.mh.se/~ant/ant.pubkey 1024D/1963012A 49C3 A871 43A8 B912 12D2 046E 8FCC 6062 1963 012A - -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBIpAbj8xgYhljASoRApA0AKCRV+0ZT8SQsmZkrNq2HpYmS7n/2wCeLbWl rzzfuzqhEzbZTdajK12+sYU= =YRkg -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Xmame mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://toybox.twisted.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/xmame
