Quote: There's a reason MAMEdev is very on-point with recommending i7, not i5. An i7-6700K will run pretty much everything flat-out. You take your chances with lesser systems.
Except an i7 will not help with the Mame STV driver as it is very poorly multithreaded, load is overwhelmingly on a single core, only occasionally making use of a second core, let alone 4 cores with hyperthreading.