cfx wrote:Take what you're spending on that thermal grease you don't need to get the extra 1GB; not a single 2GB stick but a pair of 1GB ones. You don't want to run this CPU with single channel memory. It makes no sense whatsoever to be overclocking while simultaneously constraining what is just default performance. It's the same thing with you talking about disabling the second core. MAME is probably single-threaded (I don't know or care) but XP itself will assign tasks to the two cores, and without the ability for it to do that again you will find random unexplained frame dips.
Good explanation here. Now that I think of it, all the Intel multicore chips I'm familiar with are quite smart with power usage when there's just one core doing work. MAME is, of course, singlethreaded,
except for the might-as-well option for putting rendering on a different thread. Any future emulator which makes use of multithreading would be severely hampered by disabling a core here, and of course cfx's right, if a service in the background starts doing something fun and wacky, you don't want MAME's execution thread suddenly having to share time with that.
It's such a gentle chip, anyway, that I'd not be overly worried about its heat usage. It's only slightly more demanding than 35W chips found in many laptops. If heat, cooling, and dust avoidance are that important, ultimately you'll have to go to a lower-power part, rather than trying to break the design from doing what it's intended to do.
The comments on RAM are worth discussing a bit further: Sluggish multitasking and desktop performance in Windows shouldn't be terribly relevant to running a single program with near-total CPU control (so long as you're not so resource constrained that your program is swapping to disk itself, and keeping in mind what cfx said about having a second core for services). It is nice to have Windows responsive when you do quit out of MAME or some other program, but if you've got things organized and tamed some of the components, that pain should be minimal. But overall, I think that getting a reasonable amount of RAM (no less than 3GB for a modern system) is a great idea, especially since it gives you room for the future.
Two other things that are seriously worth a look:
Linux (most any emulator worth its salt has a Linux distro, and this ought to be a way to avoid a lot of the fun of Windows)
A solid state drive (even a tiny 4K MAME ROM can take ages to load if it's on an idled magnetic disk with the heads parked).
