MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin - Re: Build me a system...

If you want cheap and powerful machine for MAME, pick up the following...

GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
$52.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128357

Intel Celeron E3400 Wolfdale 2.6GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80571E3400
$49.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116348

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-8500CL5D-4GBPK
$79.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231166

SAPPHIRE 100287VGAL Radeon HD 5670 (Redwood) 512MB 128-bit DDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
$69.99 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102871
$59.99 after rebate

------------
$252.96 ($242.96 after rebate)

The CPU I've chosen above should easily overclock to around 3.5GHz without raising the CPU voltage. I have a similar Wolfdale that went from 2.5 GHz to 3.5 GHz with no problems using the stock shitty Intel heatsink/fan. I have an ASUS motherboard based on the same Intel chipset and I was able to do the overclock by only changing TWO BIOS settings: 1) drop the memory divider to the lowest setting which was listed as "667MHz" which is really a 3:5 divider, and 2) raise the front side bus to 280 from the default 200. You can also play around with dropping the multiplier slightly if it results in better overclocking results. My CPU's default multiplier is 12.5x, the CPU above is 13. You may find that with the Gigabyte board, you can drop the multiplier to 12 and increase the FSB over 280.

Note that the Intel G31 based motherboards don't have fully unlocked memory dividers, so to overclock, you need to buy faster memory, drop the multiplier to the lowest setting, then raise the front-side-bus, which on these boards overclocks the CPU and memory at the same time. This is why I've selected 1600 memory for an 800 motherboard, in case you were curious.

As a side note, the above CPU actually supports Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x), believe it or not. You might find that useful if you play around with VirtualBox or VirtualPC and mix and match 32/64-bit guests/hosts.

GroovyMAME support forum on BYOAC