Hardware Upgrade Advice

[jonathancarty]

Soooooooo,

I bought a second hand Bespoke Arcade cocktail table last year with the following specs:

AsRock G31M-S Motherboard http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/G31M-S/
Intel Celeron [email protected]
1 Gb RAM
Intel G33/31 Express Chipset Family GMA 3100 Integrated Graphics 384Mb memory

When I bought it MAME was running beautifully but the console emulators struggled. I upgraded the GPU to an Nvidia GTS 250 1024Mb GPU, the processor to a Core2Duo E8600 SLB9L 3.33GHz and the RAM to 4Gb. All second hand on EBay for not much money

All now working perfectly but as my collection has grown the system is struggling with more modern games. The kids love playing the MAME collection and NES, SNES, Spectrum and N64 games but the system is struggling with PS1, PS2 and Gamecube games.

The cabinet is great, joysticks, buttons, sound and cooling all good. I don't think the motherboard can take much more upgrading so my question is this....

I'm looking to buy a new system to put in the cabinet, I'm obviously on a budget and have been looking at second hand gaming PCs on EBay (of which there are plenty), what would you guys recommend with regard to minimal processor, RAM and GPU requirements to get the system up and running to the more demanding PS2 games.

I've had alot of great advice from these forums so would appreciate any expert info

Thanks

Jon

[stigzler]

http://valid.canardpc.com/si4pw7

Runs everything up to Wii (inc PS2 + PSP). Struggle with some Wii games (that Monster Masher game or something..) but does manage others.

Interesting link - so there's someone here in the UK making a living out of this!? They need a new R+D guy for their Driving cab imho.

[stigzler]

+ btw - whoa! Horace Goes Skiing

[DazzleHP]

My current build which runs an HD7870 (yes, that exact card) previously ran with same board, same RAM and the same CPU. It ran PS2 and GameCube perfectly fine, in 1080p on most games with an inferior HD5750 1GB card. I have 650w PSU (which no doubt helped) but you don't need crazy hardware to get these types of Emu's running smooth.

Grab yourself an i3 - they are cheap, and the threading capabilities really will help your performance. They really are the poor man's i7

Get a half decent board to house it. Personally, Gigabyte boards rock, Asus and MSI are known to rule too.

A bit of decent memory and an average dedicated GPU and you're laughing.

An i3 with the right board will shock you

[Kustom Kid]

My current build which runs an HD7870 (yes, that exact card) previously ran with same board, same RAM and the same CPU. It ran PS2 and GameCube perfectly fine, in 1080p on most games with an inferior HD5750 1GB card. I have 650w PSU (which no doubt helped) but you don't need crazy hardware to get these types of Emu's running smooth.

Grab yourself an i3 - they are cheap, and the threading capabilities really will help your performance. They really are the poor man's i7

Get a half decent board to house it. Personally, Gigabyte boards rock, Asus and MSI are known to rule too.

A bit of decent memory and an average dedicated GPU and you're laughing.

An i3 with the right board will shock you

FWIW I have a PC with an i3-2120, Asrock H77M-ITX mobo, XFX Radeon 7770 Core, 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM and it chugs on a fair amount of Wii games. I haven't optimized, or do anything besides the initial setup on Dolphin though. I ended up forgoing Wii emulation all together on my primary PC as my Wii still runs fine.

I don't doubt what DazzleHP posted, but you'll have to do some tweaking to get it running properly.

[jonathancarty]

Thanks

Forgot to also mention that I upgraded the PSU to Antec HCG620M 620 W 80+ Bronze Power Supply Unit

Good advice so far, I'll keep looking.

PS Gotta take your hats off to Bespoke Arcades for building a business around this!!

[Kustom Kid]

In doing some research I've found a number of people recommending the anniversary edition Pentium G3258 with a Z97 motherboard. Apparently it overclocks like a beast and has great performance with Dolphin. It's also about $50(USD) right now. Those with a mid-range AMD graphics card and you should be good to go.

[nullPointer]

In doing some research I've found a number of people recommending the anniversary edition Pentium G3258 with a Z97 motherboard. Apparently it overclocks like a beast and has great performance with Dolphin. It's also about $50(USD) right now. Those with a mid-range AMD graphics card and you should be good to go.

I'm at this very time doing a new build with this exact processor (heh, I moved the guts from my HTPC into a new case and I just couldn't leave an empty case sitting around right? ). Unfortunately I had to RMA the motherboard for which I've not yet received a replacement, so I don't really have any feedback other than to say, I had the same thoughts regarding this processor. I'm using it for HTPC and light gaming, but yeah for the price it can't be beat AFAIC (hopefully the build bears that out)

The motherboard I RMA'd was this one. Kinda weird; the mobo would POST, but then ... nothing. No BIOS, no OS, nothing. Full on zombie mode. Seemed to me like it could have been a bad BIOS or something, but I wasn't about to screw around with it to find out. Back to Newegg she went!

[DazzleHP]

It ain't fiction, i can give you a tech report, with vids if need be. I stand by my previous post.

i3 + good board + nice ram + powerful PSU =

It is that simple.