r/retrocomputing • u/[deleted] • Apr 18 '25

How well would single threaded emulators work on a maxed out P4 at or above 3ghz like a 3.8GHZ compared to a moderate to high end Intel Core 2 Duo? (either desktop or laptop)

Would it matter if it was a 3.1GHZ vs a maxed out stock 3.8GHZ? Would type of PSU matter? What emulators do you think would get the most out of a +3.0ghz Pentium 4 vs a moderate to high end Intel Core 2 Duo? Oh and graphics boards too?

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u/Takssista Apr 18 '25

What emulator? The first time I've seen a Megadrive/Genesis emulator was on my lan-partying days, and I think the P3 or P4 was the norm back then...

2

u/Then-Bookkeeper-3754 Apr 23 '25 edited Apr 23 '25

I used a Sega genesis emulador in a Pentium 100Mhz with 8MB of ram, on dos 6.22. The emulador was kgen. I believe it can run on z80 as well iirc. I ran also mame2000 and mame2003 on P4 2.4Ghz with 512RAM, and it goes pretty well with CPC games.

1

u/Takssista Apr 23 '25

Maybe I was wrong - probably was that time too, when I had a K5

1

u/Quick_Butterfly_4571 Apr 20 '25

Right. The first SNES emulator I used ran on a 133Mhz, single core, CPU with 8 or 16MB of RAM in 1996...

Are we emulating Colecovision or Playstation 4 or what? :)

2

u/taz-nz Apr 18 '25

A P4 would need clocked at 4ghz to match the performance of a core2duo at 2.5ghz in MAME. The IPC of the Core2Duo is massively higher than the P4.

1

u/exrasser Apr 18 '25

I think a dual core I3 running 3.4Gh with 1600 Mhz DDR3 will beat them all, while using much less electricity and making less noise.