MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: so, which would theoretically be best for MAME?

> 4970k Devil's Canyon or 5820k Haswell-E? The 4970k has faster clock speed, but the
> 5820k has 4 core (plus the more modern Z99 motherboard and DDR4 RAM).
>
> I'm still struggling with a P4, so anything's better, but I'm just wondering which
> route to take... Pretty much just for gaming. Might depend on which mobo Broadwell
> will support, from a more future proof perspective... Although with PCs that's always
> tricky to predict...

Clock speed is going to be king. I'm not sure what the overclocking headroom is on either, but once you have 4 cores, anything additional is unlikely to help MAME. Truthfully, I doubt anything more than dual cores helps, but as far as a high performance chip, you probably won't find a dual-core model that hits high enough to provide the best possible performance for MAME.

As far as DDR3 vs DDR4, it's highly unlikely to make a difference. Most of the OC'ing on Intel chips is going to come from buying an unlocked k cpu and upping the clock multiplier. Upping the FSB (or whatever it's called these days) is just going to cause instability on anything other than meager clock rate increases.

I have an i5 2500k @ 4.4ghz and it runs great for most games. Some of the semi-recent STV improvements have caused some slowdown when it's in high resolution mode. But I can run the Midway 3D games (including Zeus based games) fine. I think Andrew's MAME benchmarks may be of interest to you so search the boards and you should be able to find a link.