“Strongest” Emulator Device

Get an Intel system with the highest CPU clock you can afford. You need maximal single-threaded CPU performance for emulation - essentially nothing else is going to matter.

SpamYouToDeath said:

Get an Intel system with the highest CPU clock you can afford. You need maximal single-threaded CPU performance for emulation - essentially nothing else is going to matter.

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So does the clock speed of cpu tell you a single thread or multi?

No it doesn't, you just have to look up the CPU specs at Intel's website.

PrepVet said:

So does the clock speed of cpu tell you a single thread or multi?

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The clock speed reflects, roughly, single-thread performance. Newer CPU designs will get more out of each clock cycle, too. You're basically looking for the newest and fastest Intel chip you're comfortable with, because they're the undisputed leader in this.

Multi-threaded performance is determined by the clock speed as well as by how many cores you have. Most work in an emulator is going to be on a single thread, so more cores doesn't really help. Most of the systems you're emulating only had a single CPU to begin with, so there's not really meaningful work to be done by two or more cores. Even when emulating a multi-processor system, the synchronization cost of actually running the emulator on two cores is likely not worth it. So don't bother with getting a lot of CPU cores if you're just using the machine for emulation (or any gaming, really - even new games do a bad job utilizing multiple threads).

WoodyXP said:

Here is the strongest emulator device.

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what is that? skynet?

PC is king, it's the only way to play saturn, dreamcast and ps2 to a decent standard.
If you want to play pce, snes, md, neo, cps1 and 2 mame and 8 bit stuff the psp, pi 3 and the ogxbox are pretty mint.
Ogxbox will just about play n64 and ps1 as well but there's some serious slowdown, but you have got coin ops, FBL and visionary, which are brilliant TBH.
Psp is great for handheld retro gaming and play's ps1 games pretty much spot on and the ad hoc emulators let you hook up for 2 player action.
my pi 3 can run dreamcast (which none of the above can do) but it's slow, and it's a pc for the saturn emulation nothing else comes close.

PrepVet said:

So what would be a minimum spiced PC to run emulation for GameCube, PS2, Saturn etc?

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I was able to emulate Wii and PS2 easily on an i5-3570k and 660ti.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-3470+@+3.20GHz

Ok as a staring point?