I've just gained possesion of an Apple MacBook Pro on which I've installed windows XP. I have an older laptop with a Pentium P4 3.2ghz processor. The MacBook has an Intel Core 2 Duo processor clocked at 2.4ghz. Although having a superior graphics card than my older laptop, I worried that the Mac's slower clock speed would have an impact in applications such as MAME.

How wrong could I have been.

The increase in performance is astounding. Games like Tekken 3 and Ridge Racer, which struggled to reach frame rates of 5fps on the Pentium P4, now run very smoothly on the Core 2 Duo. I'm absolutely amazed by the performance increase.

The MacBook Pro's graphics card is a Nvidia Geforce 8600m GT vs my older laptops Nvidia Geforce FX 5600. I know MAME doesn't use graphic cards for performance but I can't believe a processor can have such a dramatic increase on graphics performance.