Mine's not much newer than Paratech's. Bios claims it as an AMD K7 Athlon 1200 Mhz. Hope this helps.
I will point out -- this suspicion of issues with Athlon PC's started with a couple other posts on another forum...
pSX emulator - Problems with pSX on Kubuntu 7.04
pSX emulator - pSX won't start 
pSX emulator - pSX v1.11 released
This post is very interesting as it seems to have comments from people involved with the coding of pSX. It indicates that the latest version has some new optimization that causes problems on older Athlon's, while implying such optimization isn't really necessary for PS1 at all! There is some talk of the last pre-release WIP *not* including such optimization. Boy, if there's still copies of such a Linux WIP around, I would love to get my hands on such a thing! Perhaps they could post it on the project website, and put notes indicating that 1.10 and the WIP were the last versions that worked with older Athlon PC's. I'll also post in the other forum.