Build a fast WinUAE PC at an affordable Price
 

My Laptop from 2012 is good enough for my daily PC activities, but the emulation of OS4 is rather slow.

Now I want to buy a Desktop PC which does nothing else than emulating OS4, but this should be done as fast as possible. What would be a good configuration?
But I also dont't want to waste money on components which don't speed up WinUAE.

For example, I know that WinUAE doesn't use multiple cores. So when choosing the CPU I will only look which one has a high Mhz value, but ignore the rest of its data?

As hard drive a SSD should also give a much better experience in WinUAE than a harddisk does?

What about the graphics card and other hardware components? Are there aspects which considerably speed up WinUAE?

CPU: Fastest single threaded performance with large caches; highend desktop i5
SSD: Ofcourse, why not?
GFX: Likely doesn't really matter at all, you could even go with Intel GFX.

You basically just want fast single-thread CPU performance.

The best bang for your bucks could be a system built around an overclocked Pentium G3258. It has been very popular for gaming rings since it overclocks so easily and most games doesn't scale well beyond 2 cores anyway. Many people report reaching 4GHz on the stock cooler and at that clock speed the single-thread performance is close to that of a good i7 rig.

Gfx, HDD and RAM are less important. I would always go for an SSD though.

Edit: Perhaps Core i3-6100 would also be worth taking a closer look at. Not sure if it overclocks well, but even at stock 3.7GHz it should do quite well.

Most important: fastest CPU with large caches, fast RAM (=DDR4, dual channel or better). Emulators want as fast as possible CPU with as much as possible memory bandwidth. I'd recommend at least i5. There is also good chance that soon to be released Ryzen AMD CPU has good single core performance too..

Modern CPU built-in GPU is more than enough.

SSD is not required by recommended, 120G or so SSD should have more than enough space and they aren't expensive anymore.

Thank you all for your answers!

(Hi Tony, its a long time we are not on the same "room".)

I have just purchased a system with I3-7350K and DDR4 3000.
It has the highest passmark rate for a single core and it is overclockable. I'll test it when components will be here.

The only "undersized" part is cache. I have a question: from you experience, which is the difference beetween a 40MB cache processor, a 20, an 8 and a 3MB one ?

Best Regards,
Giuseppe Chillemi

Listen! He is informed. :great

However, laptops have their own set of CPUs. We're not really talking 'rig build advice' if you insist it must be a laptop, because you must select a finished product. Each make has their own special brand of CPU choking. :lol :nuts

But it's still the case that only CPU matters, and only single-thread performance. That's regarding emulation in general and Amiga emulation specifically.

As for how well WinUAE runs AmigaOS 4 on top of emulating an Amiga is really up to the respective devs. AmigaOS 4 might be tuned to run well on hardware; WinUAE might be optimized really well to emulate hardware and still run into some things neither have thought of.

Remember also that resolution is a deciding factor in performance. Twice the number of pixels, half the performance (or less).

Anyway, /rant. Everyone here knows all this :)

Read his post again. He is using a laptop now but wanted to build a desktop PC for WinUAE, so he can freely choose any CPU he likes and not just the handicapped ones you get in laptops. :)

Toni,
what is the best cpu for winuae actually ??
Do you think a change is to expect in the single-thread speed in cpu world ??
I mean a real improvement not just a 10% or 15% improve ??
Do you know if somebody is working or think about working on a multi-threaded uae ???
And what could be the difference in performance for a single-threaded uae vs a multi-threaded ???
And finally do you think that you will see one day a multi-threaded optimized uae ??:confused

I said screw it and have been running my C-Net BBS WinUAE on a discarded Dell R420 server right beside some Hyper-V VM's and using the WinPcap/A2065 emulation.