The main thing about these K6 2 / K6 3 processors is they were able to drop into just about all older Socket 7 motherboards and continue to perform great for years after Intel abandoned the platform. Picture upgrading from a Pentium 1 to a K6 2 400mhz probably doubling the performance with a simple drop in upgrade, and those Pentium 2's and 3's back then were not cheap. Typical AMD making a consumer friendly product and a lasting platform vs Intel constantly changing platforms.
I had a k6-II 550 in the late 90s. It was a nice cheap and powerful upgrade over my k6-II 300. They made a special Quake 2 "3D-Now!" driver which basically doubled the FPS in that game.
I was a 300A overclocker in the day, and sporting my TNT2 ultra, and a fellow brought his K6-2 with voodoo3 to our lan party. And I was rather shocked to find him pulling ahead in FPS in Q2 with a 400mhz machine vs my machine at 504. Quite a surprise.
@@kyrieeleison1905 on some motherboard there were 112 bus speed , one could use that to improve but generally Amd k 6 never could do what it claimed - kinda disappoint buying a new socket 7 and processor 300k6 3dnow and find the new pentium mmx beat it at much lower speeds
must say been an awesome ride down memory lane with all your retro pc builds. i started off with the 286 and loved a 386amd dx40 back in the day.. just recently got donated a pt 100mhz cpu board and 16mb ram o what fun lol
I had a standard k6-2 550 chip in the early 2000s. I remember that it ran hot and was unstable. I actually ran it underclocked to 500 MHz to keep it cool and used it like that for something like 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD guy but I think they tried to push that chip just a little harder than it could bear.
Great video Phil! I should mention that you can achieve even greater performance in CPU bound titles by using a 3Dfx card like the Voodoo3 or 5. GeForce cards will help in MDK2 and other TnL enabled titles, but for the rest of them, 3Dfx helps quite a bit because their driver had less CPU overhead apparently and it truly does show on benchmarks. Of course, for games that also support Glide, you can get even lower CPU overhead and that also helps quite a bit. Someone here has mentioned the K6-III+ and whether or not that will help in raising performance. It's not a big jump, it seems like the 128KB cache go a long way already in uplifting the performance compared to a standard K6-2, so the 256KB on the K6-III+ will only give you a couple more frames in most situations. I've also seen that using 128MB RAM instead of 256MB on Aladdin V gives you a couple more fps on average, MVP3 does not suffer from this. Add all of these in the mix, maybe push another 50MHz to reach 600MHz if you're lucky and you can get these little guys to be even more competitive!
Yea I'm locked in with this GPU for comparison sake. I did this "best graphics card for SS7" a while ago, that has a ton of data to go nuts over. The chipset is the reason I'm using 128 MB on the GA-5AX, and 256 on the BH6. The K6-III+ will get tested soon enough and I have something else in mind, to be revealed :) I could include older games, but they all run at 100+ FPS pretty much. Anything with Glide does indeed work great on a V3.
Back in the days, i upgraded from my first PC with a 200Mhz Pentium MXX to a 350Mhz K6-2 (it was a recommendation from the local hardware store as i was not so experienced). It was quicker, but not THAT much and it always got anhilated from the PII 266 a friend had in its system. The PII of of course was much more expensive and some later games which utilized the 3DNow Instructions run quite well on the k6-2, but overall it was not a good upgrade considering the costs for memory and super socket 7 board. lesson learned. the next pc i build myself.
I also upgraded to a K6-2 350 back then from a P166MMX. (If u want to upgrade to PII u must buy a whole new system, no thx) And i had a Voodoo II 12MB then a Voodoo Banshee 16MB VGA. So... with the 3dnow ext. my system or fps numbers equal with the duple prices intel + nv tnt setups. Interesting times back then and after that i only bought AMD cpus. Duron 600 but run at 1000mhz... then Athlon XP, Sempron... Phenom II X4 BE at 4Ghz. For me AMD the best buy and price per value products since 20 years.
I still have aluminum cover of a K6-2/350AFR (2.2V) that was running at 616Mhz (5,5x112Mhz) 3,3V (with aluminum cover removed). YES, it was 3,3V !!!, max what I could jumper out on FIC VA-503+ motherboard. It was also posting at 672Mhz (6*112) but was crushing while booting. One day I decided try some voltage settings for some Cyrix processor, which was 3,5V ... and it was the end of this processor...
One minor correction, cache stores *recently* used data. The idea being that if you've fetched a page from RAM once, you're probably going to use it again in the future. For example, reading a texture from storage and then later performing operations against that texture to color it or apply it to different models in different ways. The CPU usually doesn't know the cache is there, the cache just handles all memory accesses and serves cached pages from its own cache memory.
Well done,the music was a huge improvement this time. Not perfect, but it didn't make me want to completely mute the video this time either. On the topic of the video itself, well done. Am I right in recalling that the FPU performance in the whole K62 range wasn't as good as the Intel CPUs, so games that relied on the FPU didn't do as well as expected, but if they weren't reliant on FPU the K62s did quite well, and I remember them being much less expensive than the Intel chips. I also remember going into several PC stores and having the sales staff at this time tell me to not buy an AMD system, "because they're just not as compatible, they will freeze and crash" but these same people also tried to tell me that the K62 was the first CPU AMD had ever made, that they were new to the market, and they didn't expect them to last. I had a great laugh at them at the time, as I had an AMD 386DX40 at home, which they denied ever existed, hahaha.
One of the reasons AMD/Cyrix FPU being remembered as slow was a trick Intel introduced in P5 Pentium to speed up their FPU. Intel made FXCH instruction free (almost superscalar), this allowed you to keep issuing non overlapping commands to pipelined FPU without stopping whole processor. Various FPU instructions itself are pretty fast (some K6 faster than P2), but with this clever optimization you get two floating point operations being executed at the same time on Intel. This is what Carmack and Abrash (gods of code optimization) used to make Quake playable on 100MHz chips. This is also the reason AMD K5-K6 chips are clock for clock 30% slower in Dos Quake.
I had a Cyrix 6x86 pr166+ back in those days, I remember I would have to turn off all the caches to get some games to work God's, Zool 2, Hind? few others.
Short anser to a pretty complex question: Clock for clock, the K6 line was faster than the P6 line on x86 instructions, but slower on x87 (floating point) instructions.
I had a Super 7 computer back in the day, it was a garage sale find and my first "all to myself!" computer (in comparison to the newer family computer). Naturally I eventually sold it in another garage sale after I found an old Dell PIII for $5 at another sale. wish I'd kept it, I would have so much fun playing with it now.
i have a bunch of old computers and i can guarantee messing around with them is not as fun as it seems from watching these videos :X old things fail way too often to be enjoyable.
@@adg1355 Some games running on the id tech 3 engine were indeed a slide show. Quake 3 was okeish... But for me nothing beats the intro of Soldier of Fortune on the K6-2... "John do you reeaaaaaaaaad reaaaaaad reaaaaad" "looooou looooud annnnnnnnnd cleeeaaaar haaaaaawwkkk" "Cooo cooo coops"
I really liked the end music :) You should have panned the camera, filmed closed and "panned" with the focus or panned over the build or something instead of just having a static image. Details like that lift the whole experience.
suggestion Phil, for quake, there is a 3dnow exe for the game, give the 3d now path a bench when doing stuff like this, it was free and small enough even those of us on dialup downloaded (and the 3dnow enhanced executables/patches for other major titles as well..)
K6-2 i think also had special multiplier setting for older boards, where when you set multiplier to 2x , cpu recognized it as 6x and ran at full speed (6x66mhz = 400mhz circa). I used that cpu in old fujitsu siemens pc that officially supported only pentium mmx up to 200mhz. worked like a charm
Not entirely like a charm ;) I happen to still have and use such setup as my DOS/early Windows retro machine. And what a sweet setup it is, a K6-2+ 500 (6x83) in an Asus T/I-P55T2P4 mobo running 128 MB of Crucial SIMMs, Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro PCI, dual Diamond Monster 3D IIs and AWE32 sound card. Unfortunately, in most benchmarks it performs significantly slower than the same setup sporting a Pentium 233 MMX @291 (3,5x83) so matching the results of Pentium II or III shown above is simply unthinkable. That's why my other two retro rigs are Dual Pentium II 450 and a Pentium III 1000. Still, it's a lot of fun for mid 90s games ;)
That's interesting... I have a nice socket7 Tyan motherboard that came to me with a K6-2, and I was thinking about replacing it with a spare P233 just to see how it compares on identical hardware. The P233 was in my main machine for many years and with W95 it was pretty slick.
Just got a computer with an AMD K6-2 450 on the same motherboard. I love the ceramic design of the CPU! Thanks for the video :) Full configuration: - CM: Gigabyte GA-5AX - CPU: AMD K6-2 450 Mhz - RAM: SDRAM 256 mo - GPU: Rage 128 32mb - Carte Son: Advance Logic 120
That's Screamer 2, right? The original Screamer had texture warping near the bottom of the screen very similar to every PSX racing game ever made, and I don't think it had dirt stages in it. I definitely recognize the car models though. I went straight from a K6-166 to an Athlon 800. I built my K6 just a bit too early, I would have loved to have built a K6-2 but the timing is what it is. I really loved the (Super) Socket 7 platform as it's what I cut my teeth on way back when, and I've always wanted to built a K6-2+. I think it's about time I finally did that. I've always felt that this chip would make the perfect late-DOS/Win98 gaming platform.
i went from pentium 233mmx to atlhon 700 and that was already a 4x+ improvement. i can only imagine what it was for you. good old slot k7. i really like slot cpus :(
This video is awesome mate. You answer every question I had/have about the CPUs of those times but I think the chipsets have a big influence on the benchmarks, I think.
Back in 99 ish . My childhood friend got a k6-2 350mhz , 64mb ram , Voodoo 3 3500 . Was all powerful and voodoo magic, but his gaming rig crashed all the time . My rig was a P2 333 mhz , 96mb ram , nvidia 256 annihilator pro 32ddr . And my rig neaver crashed or bs 😅 I miss the old days😢
I know that K6-III+ 550 is extremely rare and expensive nowadays but I have done cheap purchase. Overclocked K6-III+ 400@ 577 MHz and it rocks ! It have double cache L2 in compare to K6-2+.
Thanks for the video and the utilities for "plus" cpu. They will come in handy. The K6-III+ are easily to find on ebay than K6-2+ and relatively cheap, though they are low voltage parts. Unfortunately my K6-III+ is still on the way, somewhere in the depot :(
The lowest I managed to snag a GA-5AX for was $130 … nearly as much as I paid for my current desktop’s motherboard @.@ . I ended up getting inspired because I had a K6-2/450 and a K6-2/500 in a bin of parts I hadn’t opened in over 13 years. Was honestly kind of surprised when I put it all together and it just popped back to life. Now I gotta track down a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive to complete my build. They’re going for so darn expensive right now.
Just dug up an old windows 98 laptop that i used to play with as a kid ... turns out it has a K6-2 450 cpu , has 28MB of RAM and 5GB of storage , a floppy and even a cd-rom drive back then i had no idea what it did but i knew it was old and outdated (i was born in 2001 for reference) now im currently an Electrical Engineering student and happened to discover this old gem , still works perfectly fine i wonder what i can do with it, i have wanted to tinker with old windows and dos for years and thought this laptop was gone ... thought my parents had thrown it out or gave it away but no... it was in our basement and it still works perfectly thats why i clicked on this video , to find more about the K6-2 thats inside Edit after watching: Kinda dissapointed to see that the K6-2 500 non-plus is on the same level as the PII 330 ... which makes my 450 on the same level as the PII 300 but i wasnt really expecting anything when I dug it up, i would have been happy even if it was a 386 or 486 system , whatever it is i am gonna do a lot of tinkering with it definitely will play dos games , maybe trying to run tinycore linux on it , or maybe try to even program my own DOS game for it using C or C++ as Im quite familiar with both
@@philscomputerlab One quick update : (Edit: It was not quick at all, instead it was a long, LONG tangent) It took me hours to figure out how to make it able to recognise my USB flash drive by way of installing an unofficial 3rd party driver by way of burning it on a cd in my modern computer , then I was finally able to finally able to download programs for it on my main computer and then simply transfer them over I 've put a few games in it as well but havent tried them . For now i have been more focused on getting everything over and setting up productivity apps. It used to have MS office 2000 but it didnt work, the installation must have been corrupted somehow so I removed it and put MS Office XP instead , and it works perfectly, i installed a small pdf viewer (3 mb only) from that era and also Visual Studio 6.0 for programming ... It feels insane to me that a computer with only 28 MEGABYTES of RAM can use a FULL MS Office suite that I can actually do most of what you would want from it , can read pdfs albeit a bit slowly , and I can actually do solid programming work on... (Yes its a bit slow , yes I can do all these things with more comfort on a modern machine , with a bigger screen and resolution, and with internet connectivity ... but the fact that I can do any of that at all in such an old and underpowered machine in almost the same way as I would do in a modern PC is absolutely crazy to me) In any case , now that I got all my productivity software in place... games are next... Im gonna have an absolute blast with this And I will be honest ... the process of troubleshooting , spending hours to make everything work has been almost if not just as fun as actually using it (same with setting up my secondary desktop that runs linux a few months ago) Am I some kind of masochist ? Anyway this has been a long rant and I dont expect you to read any of it but If you are ... Thank you for actually creating content for these machines , I am fascinated by that era of computing and my journey exploring it has only just started
Something about the 250-500mhz range in CPUs are just so fun and I look back so fondly in this little niche despite the fact it was in 2005-2006 when I was dealing with these machines as those were what people were getting rid of for free. I mean you got slots, sockets, large half speed 512kb slot l2 or socketed full speed but half size cache. You had Celeron 300a’s able to outdo the exhorbantly priced p2 300 when oc’d. Also in this time the K6 one of the most intriguing cpu lines of all time for me.
I'm really glad I kept my super socket 7 system, and I upgraded it to K6-2+ a couple years ago. It seems just recently everying is catching up. I have a MSI board that doesn't properly support the k6-2+. When it was a k6-2, it said' Detected K6-2 CPU at 450Mhz, and then I run a K6-2+ at 600 Mhz, it says "Detected CPU at 20 Mhz". Yes, 20. But everything works, fine. There is a claimed newer BIOS I can flash, but I'm not risking bricking the thing just to fix the startup screen. Hey, you should do a video on Socket 939. I have one I've been thinking about getting rid of, but who knows maybe I should hang on to it because it might be the next retro curve, who knows! I passed up TRS-80 MC-10 when they were on ebay for $5 or $10 going unsold, and then suddenly out of nowhere everyone wanted one and now some of them are $100.
I might do a video on flashing a SS7 board. If the chip is socketed and you have a flasher than it's super safe to try out. I think I have one board that I had to flash to get K6-2+ and K6-III+ support. I think I even paid for the BIOS file to download, it was one of these driver archive sites.
Got my K6-2+ 550MHz when they were widely available at price 5$. Then again, never have installed it, running K6-2 500MHz instead. That is already too fast for many retro games. Now knowing how easy the ”plus” is to underclock, I think I’ll give it a go...
Do it and set it at 600. It blows the doors off a K6-2. The K6-2 at higher speeds was bottlenecked by the slow L2 cache on the motherboard. Having a full-speed L2 on the chip and making the motherboard cache an L3 made a huge difference. It didn't do much for FPU performance, but the overall performance increase helped some. I got better FP numbers with the "plus" chips at the same speeds.
That turtle beach soundcard looks earily familiar to some C-media soundscard i bought in around 2002. The drivers was in chinese and often completely hanged the system on trying to install on win xp sp1. Sp1 was notorious for crashing, but still
K6-2 550 (not K6-2+, just K6-2) was a steaming pile of crap. Factory overclocked. And not really any good anyway, because above 400 MHz, the 100 MHz cache speed from the motherboard bottlenecked the classic K6-2. I had several K6-2+ and K6-III+ CPUs back in the day, and still have some of them. Those were fantastic and I was using them as late as about 2005, and longer than that in retro rigs, but the K6-2 stopped being competitive at the higher speeds. It needed fast cache.
You know what. It's kind of mind boggling how we've come from a 180nm process in the K6 2 500/550 to the next gen Ryzen 4 being 5nm in 20 years. Even Gen 3 at 7nm is crazy.
I had the K5 133, K6 166, K6-2 300, K6-3 450 and I really liked them all although as far as I remember they would not overclock the slightest (maybe run for 10 minutes, then BSOD or restart). I personally always bought AMD (still using AMD) but I never had a stable overclock on any chip... maybe unlucky or AMD really tight tolerances. Bought my son a Intel DualCore 2.5 GHz and it was easily and stable with stock fan overclocked to 4.0 GHz (but it was a late model I guess) I think at that time I had AMD Athlon X2 5200 and it was way slower (then my son's overclocked DualCore)...
Went retro nuts almost a year ago, and reached the end of the line ...almost ,5 motherboards ,8 CPU's , several rams and 4+ gfx cards later, k6-2 + running at 633mhz , 768mb ram , alternating between Fx5200 nvidea card or 9000pro ati , 9000pro is more compatible , but the fx gets more fps in some newer games. Can get games like X2 -the thread just in the realm of playeble, 24fps benchmark , heck even silent hunter 3 works pretty good on it :D (game from 2005), still got a 9700pro on its way, just trying to squeeze every bit of fps out of it (on windows XP)
if you were lucky enough to have one of the top tier super 7 boards with faster ata good AGP mosfets, and large TAG ram, K6-II/K6-III were a real gamechanger. P2 was nice, but prohibitavely expensive, and a well tuned K6-II/III with a solid motherboard could get you pretty close for most things, and actually faster for web browsing.
Bei der Sockel 7 Plattform hatte ich damals das ASUS p5a-b bis zu einem K6-3+ 550 aufgerüstet. Beim Arbeitsspeicher hatte ich Infineon Riegel mit 3x256MB. Die letzte Grafikkarte die in dem System lief war eine Voodoo5 5500 AGP gepaart mit einer Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum. Die HDD war eine 4,3 GB Hitachi oder WD. War damals eine sehr teure Angelegenheit und ich musste die Taktraten sowie die Spannungen der CPU auf den Mainboard manuell Jumpern. Das war schon nervig.
I worked in the industry at that time and this was a TERRIBLE processor for a new system :(. It was ~$120, more than brand new K7 platform Duron and Coppermine Celerons. I was selling 3-7 Coppermine Celeron 533-766@800-1000 systems a week to Very happy gamer customers :). Later added K7 Durons@950 to the mix when someone found how to pencil unlock. Even mendocino celerons in 2000 overclocked great, late 366s @550 with 0.1V bump on cheapest 440BX boards, and they were ~$60 new. Made for great budget builds. Too bad you dont include 300A@450MHz in your benchmark comparisons :( it would reveal how "great" K6-2 was ;)
You got that right 100%. K6s were awful besides their price tag, and even that was nullified by the "much better in every single possible way" Mendocino Celerons by late 1998. Why there's so much love for K6s, I don't get it.
i fondly remember my first Supermicro P6SBA board, with Pentium II 450Mhz when the 450mhz had just come out - i upgraded to it from my old Packard Bell DX2-66... the best upgrade of my life i think! i was still running windows 3.1 in 1997 i think LOL i HATED the fact that win95 "Took over" DOS 6.22 so i held out for a long time, and i ran alot of DOS software, ran my own BBS etc i remember i ran some sort of multitasking DOS version near the end and it was wild... being able to run many different DOS processes and jumping around between them
I remember seeing a Pentium Pro without a heat-sink and thinking to myself just how cool it looked: a huge 'slab' of gold, such as you'd see in a museum or secret Egyptian tomb. Then I went back to my Cyrix and thought well..er..at least it's gold-looking xD
Back in 2000 I had a Pentium 233MMX and had no upgrade path because of Slot1. So I bought the K6-III/400. Its the "bad" core with 2,4V. Later I found the K6-III/450 with 2,2V for a few bucks in a garagesale together with an ASUS P5A-B and P5A. @Phil: Can you add the K6-III to your benchmarks?
Huh? I thought they topped out at 450MHz. Back in 'the day' I bought a whole series of AMD 486 and K6 chips. AMD 486/33, 50, 80, and 120. Then K6-2/300 and 450. and finally a K6-3/450. The -3 chips gained tremendous IPC and ran ~40% faster than an equally clocked K6-2 on the games I was playing at the time.
Between 1998 - 2006 I used AMD CPUs exclusively (and for the 2001 - 2006 period, I don't regret it one bit). However, in recent years, as my retro passion (translated: insanity) has grown, I started to understand WHY Intel Pentium II CPUs were so expensive back then. There's just no competition in performance and stability... these things paired with a 440BX chipset are rock solid. And I don't mean just game performance, no. Even the operating system simply behaves differently, feels MUCH snappier on a Pentium II compared to an AMD K6-2/3(+) CPU. As for the unique capability that the K6-2/3+ CPUs have... I found that, at least in my case, I don't really need it. I can play any game I want even on a fast Pentium 3 machine. Heck, even when I used a Core 2 Duo retro PC I was able to play most of the DOS games that I like (Prince, Historik, Duke3D, Quake DOS - even Monkey Island worked on the Core2 for some strange reason that I still don't understand). That being said, I do have 3 x AMD K6-2+ CPUs & motherboard combos, and I enjoy playing with them from time to time. :D
I went from a K6-2 500 / GA-5AA to a Celeron 433 / VIA133A on the same GF2 MX in early 2003, the latter was so much faster that it was night and day difference. Warcraft 3 went from a Powerpoint slideshow to playable.
@B3ro1080 , because the Core 2 Duo CPU is way too fast and because there aren't any "hardware" solutions to slow it down. Well, you can slow it down by disabling the L1 cache, which basically will make it too slow. So you are stuck with software throttling solutions, which sometimes work, but even when they work, you will most likely face some weird issues (at least in my experience). The most common problem for many games is the fact that Adlib / digital speech are not properly initiated, so the game will revert to using the PC Speaker. Other times the game won't even start at all (either because of the turbo pascal 200 error, or some different error caused by excessive speed). Anyway, this is a very vast discussion, with a lot of nuances. :-)
@B3ro1080 Of course, I'm talking about cases where you use a SB Pro / SB16 compatible card (such as the Yamaha YMF7x4 cards, Sound Blaster Live, Audigy 2 ZS) :-) The issue is not the card, it's the CPU. But, as I said, with certain motherboards/CPUs/sound card combinations, you get very good results nonetheless, somehow the speed issues seem to be avoided (almost). As for the horror stories regarding the Celeron, well, many of them are true. But the Celeron 300A is an exception, it's probably the best value CPU that ever existed.
My socket 7 board is the Gigabyte GA-586VX and it can only accept a first generation K6 200mhz cpu -- is that one capable of the same features as the K6-2?? re: the ability to control the speed etc??
I have the best SS7 motherboard ever made for sale if you're interested. Mint condition, with a K6-III CPU installed and a spare identical K6-III in the packaging still (bought a bunch of spares).
Calling on-die cache "L1 cache" was not a rebranding of cache. Initially, cache for all x86 CPUs was intended only for Instruction-fetch caching (i-cache). W/o branch prediction, pre-fetching 32 or 64 or more at a time in advance of when they're being requested by the CPU is a win. i-caches as small as a few KBs is win. This been referred to L1, whether on-die or external. Later CPUs with branch prediction can do better at improving cache hit ratios. It was realized by the end of the 386 era that many workloads were working on 64KB or more of contiguous data. In the 486 era, small L1/i-caches were brought on-die while users could increase their performance by adding L2 external cache (aka, d-cache). The Pentium era brought the L2 cache on-die for performance reasons. Today, many CPUs also have very, very large on-die L3 cache. Server-grade x86-64 CPUs have many MBs or GBs and are soon predicted to have TBs of cache.
I still have my ga-5ax along an asus p5a, they were good at the day. I just thought that my upgrade plan was very flawed, not only I upgraded from a k62 350 to a 550 but also I picked the wrong card for the job as I got a kyro 2 32mb, I loved every feature but I enjoyed more when I switched to a duron 1300 as performance with rtcw were horrible with k6 2
I must add something for those who are into k6-cpu. A k6-2+ 570 can be easily overclocked to 630mhz stable. With a fsb of 115, write combining enabled, Ali agp utilities installed, ga-5ax bios fine tuned, 128mb of cl2 ram (yes that's a lot of tweak) my system equals or beat most of the score of the non GPU related scores of the P2 450 of this video (I don't have a GeForce 2). It's an incredibly cool CPU that's around the performance of the mighty P2. My biggest regret is that not a lot of games uses 3d now! optimisations, that would have crushed Intel price/performance wise back then
@@jeremyhussein5649 What I found is that these CPUs tend to require higher voltages to get to 600, but can do 550 or thereabouts quite easily. I recommend to aim for a high FSB as that gives you the most boost but don't click beyond 550.
@@philscomputerlab yes, I use 0.1v boost to get mine perfectly stable. The 550mhz version is not a great overclocker, while the 570 acz can run at 633mhz easily. With that setting I get 56 fps in PC player, 42fps in quake , both at 640x480 and 169fps in doom. With a voodoo 3 3000 at 3500 clocks its a really great 1998/99 era of gaming machine. Most games run between 50/60 fps at 800x600. Half life gets down to 30fps sometimes but the overall experience is awesome. But yeah with the absurd prices of a good ss7 MB and a good cpu its far cheaper and easier to get a slot 1 setup. With all the tweaks and tuning you can squeeze something like 20fps and that the fun thing With this CPU.
The main board i am running on my K6-III+ is a MSI MS-5169 ALi Aladdin V Chip set it did not support the K6-III at first but lucky me there was a Bios Update.
@@Mr_Meowingtons I have some Gigabyte GA-5AA boards based on ALi Aladdin V and they are awesome. FSB up to 140 MHz and multi up to x6. I did stable OC on my K6-III+ 400 @ 577 MHz 2.1V
I may have already told this story under some other Phil's video. I've tried the K6-2+ once. I had (and still have) an Asus P/I-P55T2P4 mobo with P233MMX running at 291 MHz, a wonderful SIMM-driven mid-90s Socket-7 mobo. One day I stumbled upon a manual on THG explaining step by step how to shoehorn a K6-2+ 500 into what's basically a Pentium-only board using some easy tricks. And so I did. Since the highest CPU multiplier for Socket-7 is 6x it runs at 6x83. It required cherry-picking the right components that would run happily at 41,5 MHz PCI speed but it turned out to be a complete success... at least until I ran the benchmarks ;) The results are kinda okay but at the same time somewhat disappointing. Even though the system absolutely flies under Windows 98 and 2000, feels nippy and very responsive, in particular applications it's noticeably slower than on overclocked yet still significantly lower clocked Pentium MMX it replaced. After testing the whole thing thorougly in practice in various games I came to a conclusion that the SLI Voodoo2 setup I put in gets awfully bored as the system fails to feed the cards with data fast enough. The only good thing about such configuration is that it runs games at 1024x768 giving great image quality on 'modern' 15" LCDs, albeit being stuck in 15-30 FPS range depending on title. Let's just say that I had better experience with the original Unreal, NFS Porsche 2000 or MiG-29 Fulcrum on other systems. The results don't improve much with lowering the resolution so it's definitely CPU/RAM/MOBO that's lagging behind. Hell, sometimes I think a Pentium II 233 with a Voodoo1 I had around 1998 ran games faster at 640x480 but I may be exaggerating, idolizing my high school period PC. An interesting experience nevertheless, I highly recommend such experiments to those who enjoy upgrades for the sake of having fun benchmarking and comparing stuff :)
i can't install windows 98 on my ga 5ax, it shows Message SU991016 Unknown error, and later i got further but when i tried to boot it, it locked up and why is my pentium mmx 233 showing as a 166 mhz on boot, it may be that my ga 5ax is funky or that i didn't configure it right
Nowadays Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 are rare and expensive on eBay. I bought a DFI Super Socket 7 motherboard with black traces for cheap on a french classifed avertising, but I still could not find a Socket 7 for a reasonable price...
I remember something like MTRR caching policy set for k6-2 cpus to not evict cache by framebuffer region of the video graphic card, I remember that there was some boost in performance by doing this.
I had a k6-2 550, I should search for it in my storage if I can find it, and check if it's a k6-2 or k6-2+. As far as I remembered, It was working, and I left to upgrade to an athlon xp 2600+
K6-2+ 500 2.0v is $17 on ebay and the K6-3+ 400 1.6v is over $60 shipped... I currently have a K6-2 550... should I get the K6-2+? I could also pick up a K6-III 400mhz for cheap locally (like $2)
On an AOPEN X59 Pro motherboard with the latest BIOS the CPU Internal Cache line in BIOS is conspicuously missing. Using SETMUL's L1D/L2D (disabling both L1 and L2 cache) replicate this BIOS setting though I believe? Have you found any uses for disabling one level of internal cache while leaving the other enabled? In my experiments it seems like disabling L2 alone doesn't actually have any affect on the speed and that while you can disable one and leave the other on it's really just an on/off that requires you to disable or enable L1 to see any results.
The Pentium pro (and II) allowed you to cache the video framebuffer. This allowed you to run Quake in 640x480 in framerates comparable to 320x200 on a normal Pentium. The K6 did have the L2 cache but didn't have any tools to be setup like the Pentium pro. Shame!
i had the non + chip. a 450. overcloced it to 517 or something odd. good cheap chip back in the day. didnt they make these + for a very limited time? like the k6 III took over or something and they didnt make many of teh II+ chips i think.
absolutely not 1:30 omfg that's my mobo and my cpu (well, the same exact models i had in 1997). i can't believe i recognized them instantly just by seeing them. i didn't even open my case that much back then.
If we had all the youtube reviews we have today back in 2000 they would come to the conclusion that games are not optimised for AMD cpus.... how times have not changed!
The K6 was awful in gaming performance and general stability versus the Pentium 2, but it justified itself by its dirt low price tag. After the Celeron 300A came out which is basically P2 performance at K6 prices there's pretty much NO reason to get a K6 anymore.
As far as integer units go, K6 and Pentium II are almost the same in term of general architecture, they both are superscalar out-of-order x86 processors (thus it's not wrong to consider K6 a Pentium II class processor), except Pentium II had better FPU (it's possibly of two-way superscalar out-of-order design which was unbeatable at least until the K7 came along and smashed the Intel Pentium III and 4 processors in FPU benchmark). The only handicap K6 had was a scalar in-order FPU.
The day after I got my K6-2 500's motherboard (Gigabyte GA-5AA, the baby AT version) repaired+my AT PSU, this video pops up. I should probably start building up my SS7 collection, because the motherboard supports *everything* ever designed for Socket 5, 7 and S7 without requiring any BIOS update (beta or otherwise). Edit: Glad to see its not a K6-2 550 BTW-those things were most of the time worse than a K6-2 450. Edit 2: BTW, if anyone knows of a safe way to remove corrosion from IDE headers, could you please tell me of it? Because they are the only part of my SS7 board with corrosion and as a result I can only boot from the FDD.
I would recommend a brass brush. The brass would be harder than the corrosion, but less hard than the pins. Then you could turn the motherboard upside and and blow it out with compressed air.
Also consider using Isopropyl alcohol. If this all makes no difference, simply purchase a PCI IDE/SATA controller! Though you might want to look around on Phil's channel and in other places to research compatibility with the OS you wish to use.
I'll try both of those methods. And space is a premium on the board since its so small (1x AGP, 4x Expansion), so I really don't want to have to add a storage controller to it. Because I need room for a Riva 128ZX, 2x voodoo2 12MB, Intel 100B NIC and a rather large AD1848KP SoundPort soundcard.
In what way were the K6-2 550's worse than the 450's? I used to have a K6-550... when I first bought it, the chip was bad as it ran waaay too hot. The PC tech I went to at the time (I was like, 12) said it was better to underclock it just a bit and put it on 500 MHz. A year later I got into OC'ing and tried to run the chip at 550 MHz anyway, went without a hitch. A few years ago I even tried to run it at 600 Mhz. That was a bit much unfortunately. Aaah retro PC hardware, fond memories :).
The fact that to get the best out of the majority of K6-2 550 you had to underclock it to 500MHz, combined with the performance difference between the 500 and 550 being smaller than that of the 450 compared to the 500. In the same motherboard.
Quake II results look a bit odd, I had two systems back in the day, a K6-2 500 and a P-II 350, using the same GPU the K6-2 was always faster in Quake 2 using the 3Dnow extensions...
Used a K6-2 450 for a while. Made me long for my temporarily unavailable P3-450. On the K6-2, WinXP was sluggish and anything that required math was likely to freeze up. Finally couldn't stand it any longer and scrounged up a P4. Oh, what a relief!
Haha... Next time I'm stuck between regular PCs, I'll dredge up a temporary from a better grade of dumpster. :) XP ran pretty slick on my P3-450, and was acceptable on a P2-233. But on the K6-2? Painful.
Had Win9x on K6 and K6-2 CPUs, was always disappointed by their performance compared to P233 on the same board. For contrast, I have W2K on a dual Xeon 750 with 2GB RDRAM and SCSI HDs, and man does it FLY (at least once it gets past Compaq's sloggy BIOS, slowest I've ever seen). No idea what I'll ever need W2K for, but that setup is just too good to dump. Besides, the hardware used to belong to Jerry Pournelle (it's his old "Regina"). Tellya what you don't want to run W2K on.... I have a 486DX4-100 that I use for testing old RAM, because it's totally not-fussy and supports any 30 or 72 pin you throw at it (swings both ways). Also use it for testing old HDs, cuz its hardware detection is really fast. One day I hooked up the wrong HD and found myself watching W2K booting up. On a 486, that at the time had 8MB of RAM. (Yes, 8 _megabytes_ .) Apparently tho W2K won't _install_ on a 486, it _runs_ just fine... it took about 5 minutes to reach the desktop, but after that it was actually usable -- Office97 was a little sluggish but not terrible (and that despite having no swapfile, cuz that had been on another disk). Better than XP on the K6-2 with 512mb RAM!! I should try it again someday with more RAM and see how it does.
Not originally. But over time I became an Intel bigot, and for that AMD has only themselves to blame; Intels were more stable and less buggy.(And when I was regularly vetting salvage, I encountered occasional dead AMDs, but never saw a dead Intel, even after severe thermal abuse). And rebooting is against my religion. :)
Especially the K6-III 450MHz. Back in the day, I built a system around that chip, and it was such a wonderful machine ! It ran for about 6 years straight, first as my main computer, and it later served my dad for a number of years. 6 years might not seem a very long time these days, but back then, this was a very long time for one system to be still useful. I so loved that little machine, but somehow it got lost along the way. :(
Phrea Nix Yea, that was a great CPU :) And the next one was a K7 of course :) Nowadays you can use 10 year old CPUs and they are still fine for most of the games (most are more or less playable).
Dude, why you not to build the new K6-III based system?:) It's kinda rare and expensive, but 10 years later it will be even more. Back in that time I had Pentium 233 MMX on intel ATX motherboard (AN430TX), and it was much more hopeless. No AGP, no 66+ bus.. All the direct3d games (Carmageddon II, NFS3, NFS4) run at 10 fps with PCI Rage3D II+. I played 320x240 or 400x300 with software render mode :) I think k6 would be much nicer choise but then I had no idea.
A Rage II DVD + or even Rage IIc is a poor 3D accelerator.I know I had the Rage IIc integrated on a motherboard. A Voodoo 1 or 2 or Voodoo Banshee,RIVA 128 etc would do wonders on a Pentium 233 Mhz MMX Machine.
Hi Phil are you planning on ever doing a slot A build? Not many people going that route but I find that platform interesting. First athlon processors and the first cpu to break 1ghz were on slot A.
The main thing about these K6 2 / K6 3 processors is they were able to drop into just about all older Socket 7 motherboards and continue to perform great for years after Intel abandoned the platform. Picture upgrading from a Pentium 1 to a K6 2 400mhz probably doubling the performance with a simple drop in upgrade, and those Pentium 2's and 3's back then were not cheap. Typical AMD making a consumer friendly product and a lasting platform vs Intel constantly changing platforms.
Yup. I must have run 5~6 K6-x chips through the same Tyan Mobo over the years.
I had a k6-II 550 in the late 90s. It was a nice cheap and powerful upgrade over my k6-II 300. They made a special Quake 2 "3D-Now!" driver which basically doubled the FPS in that game.
I was a 300A overclocker in the day, and sporting my TNT2 ultra, and a fellow brought his K6-2 with voodoo3 to our lan party. And I was rather shocked to find him pulling ahead in FPS in Q2 with a 400mhz machine vs my machine at 504. Quite a surprise.
hard to believe when in this test the k6 550 was 21 fps and the p2 450 was 42 fps in quake 640x400
@@kyrieeleison1905 on some motherboard there were 112 bus speed , one could use that to improve but generally Amd k 6 never could do what it claimed - kinda disappoint buying a new socket 7 and processor 300k6 3dnow and find the new pentium mmx beat it at much lower speeds
must say been an awesome ride down memory lane with all your retro pc builds. i started off with the 286 and loved a 386amd dx40 back in the day.. just recently got donated a pt 100mhz cpu board and 16mb ram o what fun lol
I had a standard k6-2 550 chip in the early 2000s. I remember that it ran hot and was unstable. I actually ran it underclocked to 500 MHz to keep it cool and used it like that for something like 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD guy but I think they tried to push that chip just a little harder than it could bear.
Remember MMX and 3D Now!. Memories.
Great video Phil!
I should mention that you can achieve even greater performance in CPU bound titles by using a 3Dfx card like the Voodoo3 or 5. GeForce cards will help in MDK2 and other TnL enabled titles, but for the rest of them, 3Dfx helps quite a bit because their driver had less CPU overhead apparently and it truly does show on benchmarks. Of course, for games that also support Glide, you can get even lower CPU overhead and that also helps quite a bit.
Someone here has mentioned the K6-III+ and whether or not that will help in raising performance. It's not a big jump, it seems like the 128KB cache go a long way already in uplifting the performance compared to a standard K6-2, so the 256KB on the K6-III+ will only give you a couple more frames in most situations.
I've also seen that using 128MB RAM instead of 256MB on Aladdin V gives you a couple more fps on average, MVP3 does not suffer from this. Add all of these in the mix, maybe push another 50MHz to reach 600MHz if you're lucky and you can get these little guys to be even more competitive!
Yea I'm locked in with this GPU for comparison sake. I did this "best graphics card for SS7" a while ago, that has a ton of data to go nuts over. The chipset is the reason I'm using 128 MB on the GA-5AX, and 256 on the BH6. The K6-III+ will get tested soon enough and I have something else in mind, to be revealed :)
I could include older games, but they all run at 100+ FPS pretty much. Anything with Glide does indeed work great on a V3.
Back in the days, i upgraded from my first PC with a 200Mhz Pentium MXX to a 350Mhz K6-2 (it was a recommendation from the local hardware store as i was not so experienced). It was quicker, but not THAT much and it always got anhilated from the PII 266 a friend had in its system. The PII of of course was much more expensive and some later games which utilized the 3DNow Instructions run quite well on the k6-2, but overall it was not a good upgrade considering the costs for memory and super socket 7 board. lesson learned. the next pc i build myself.
I also upgraded to a K6-2 350 back then from a P166MMX. (If u want to upgrade to PII u must buy a whole new system, no thx) And i had a Voodoo II 12MB then a Voodoo Banshee 16MB VGA. So... with the 3dnow ext. my system or fps numbers equal with the duple prices intel + nv tnt setups. Interesting times back then and after that i only bought AMD cpus. Duron 600 but run at 1000mhz... then Athlon XP, Sempron... Phenom II X4 BE at 4Ghz. For me AMD the best buy and price per value products since 20 years.
I still have aluminum cover of a K6-2/350AFR (2.2V) that was running at 616Mhz (5,5x112Mhz) 3,3V (with aluminum cover removed). YES, it was 3,3V !!!, max what I could jumper out on FIC VA-503+ motherboard. It was also posting at 672Mhz (6*112) but was crushing while booting. One day I decided try some voltage settings for some Cyrix processor, which was 3,5V ... and it was the end of this processor...
One minor correction, cache stores *recently* used data. The idea being that if you've fetched a page from RAM once, you're probably going to use it again in the future. For example, reading a texture from storage and then later performing operations against that texture to color it or apply it to different models in different ways. The CPU usually doesn't know the cache is there, the cache just handles all memory accesses and serves cached pages from its own cache memory.
Well done,the music was a huge improvement this time. Not perfect, but it didn't make me want to completely mute the video this time either.
On the topic of the video itself, well done. Am I right in recalling that the FPU performance in the whole K62 range wasn't as good as the Intel CPUs, so games that relied on the FPU didn't do as well as expected, but if they weren't reliant on FPU the K62s did quite well, and I remember them being much less expensive than the Intel chips.
I also remember going into several PC stores and having the sales staff at this time tell me to not buy an AMD system, "because they're just not as compatible, they will freeze and crash" but these same people also tried to tell me that the K62 was the first CPU AMD had ever made, that they were new to the market, and they didn't expect them to last. I had a great laugh at them at the time, as I had an AMD 386DX40 at home, which they denied ever existed, hahaha.
One of the reasons AMD/Cyrix FPU being remembered as slow was a trick Intel introduced in P5 Pentium to speed up their FPU. Intel made FXCH instruction free (almost superscalar), this allowed you to keep issuing non overlapping commands to pipelined FPU without stopping whole processor.
Various FPU instructions itself are pretty fast (some K6 faster than P2), but with this clever optimization you get two floating point operations being executed at the same time on Intel.
This is what Carmack and Abrash (gods of code optimization) used to make Quake playable on 100MHz chips. This is also the reason AMD K5-K6 chips are clock for clock 30% slower in Dos Quake.
The K6 FPU and Cyrix FPU were horrible. Single point vs pipelined was a big difference. As rasz explianed.
I had a Cyrix 6x86 pr166+ back in those days, I remember I would have to turn off all the caches to get some games to work God's, Zool 2, Hind? few others.
Short anser to a pretty complex question: Clock for clock, the K6 line was faster than the P6 line on x86 instructions, but slower on x87 (floating point) instructions.
I remember first Celeron 266 (slot 1), which we overclocked with stock cooler into 448Mhz, that was really free performance. :-D
I had a Super 7 computer back in the day, it was a garage sale find and my first "all to myself!" computer (in comparison to the newer family computer). Naturally I eventually sold it in another garage sale after I found an old Dell PIII for $5 at another sale. wish I'd kept it, I would have so much fun playing with it now.
i have a bunch of old computers and i can guarantee messing around with them is not as fun as it seems from watching these videos :X
old things fail way too often to be enjoyable.
Had one of these K6-2. I remember "playing" Soldier of Fortune. It was struggling like hell.
RTCW on K6-2 was a turn-based strategy/slide show
@@adg1355 Some games running on the id tech 3 engine were indeed a slide show. Quake 3 was okeish... But for me nothing beats the intro of Soldier of Fortune on the K6-2... "John do you reeaaaaaaaaad reaaaaaad reaaaaad" "looooou looooud annnnnnnnnd cleeeaaaar haaaaaawwkkk" "Cooo cooo coops"
Very awesome Thowback to the K6 Processors.
Top content, love it! Building my k6-2+ pc soon to relive the days!
I really liked the end music :) You should have panned the camera, filmed closed and "panned" with the focus or panned over the build or something instead of just having a static image. Details like that lift the whole experience.
suggestion Phil, for quake, there is a 3dnow exe for the game, give the 3d now path a bench when doing stuff like this, it was free and small enough even those of us on dialup downloaded (and the 3dnow enhanced executables/patches for other major titles as well..)
He did use the Quake2 3DNOW! patch. I wasn't aware there was a patch for Dos Quake or GLQuake.
AMD K6-2+ 550 Mhz was my dream cpu...
wow, didnt know this would be rare. I used a K6 3 back then. Was so much fun.
Jak zwykle bardzo dobre video. From Poland
PS. interesting comparison would be K6-2+ 550 and Athlon 550 Slot A
K6-2 i think also had special multiplier setting for older boards, where when you set multiplier to 2x , cpu recognized it as 6x and ran at full speed (6x66mhz = 400mhz circa). I used that cpu in old fujitsu siemens pc that officially supported only pentium mmx up to 200mhz. worked like a charm
Not entirely like a charm ;) I happen to still have and use such setup as my DOS/early Windows retro machine. And what a sweet setup it is, a K6-2+ 500 (6x83) in an Asus T/I-P55T2P4 mobo running 128 MB of Crucial SIMMs, Diamond FireGL 1000 Pro PCI, dual Diamond Monster 3D IIs and AWE32 sound card. Unfortunately, in most benchmarks it performs significantly slower than the same setup sporting a Pentium 233 MMX @291 (3,5x83) so matching the results of Pentium II or III shown above is simply unthinkable. That's why my other two retro rigs are Dual Pentium II 450 and a Pentium III 1000. Still, it's a lot of fun for mid 90s games ;)
yeah i ran my AMD 450 K6-III+ at 600Mhz for a bit 100Mhz FSB with a 6x multiplier
That's interesting... I have a nice socket7 Tyan motherboard that came to me with a K6-2, and I was thinking about replacing it with a spare P233 just to see how it compares on identical hardware. The P233 was in my main machine for many years and with W95 it was pretty slick.
I do remember some wacky multiplier mapping.
Just got a computer with an AMD K6-2 450 on the same motherboard.
I love the ceramic design of the CPU!
Thanks for the video :)
Full configuration:
- CM: Gigabyte GA-5AX
- CPU: AMD K6-2 450 Mhz
- RAM: SDRAM 256 mo
- GPU: Rage 128 32mb
- Carte Son: Advance Logic 120
Very nice background tune for the benchmarks.
That's Screamer 2, right? The original Screamer had texture warping near the bottom of the screen very similar to every PSX racing game ever made, and I don't think it had dirt stages in it. I definitely recognize the car models though.
I went straight from a K6-166 to an Athlon 800. I built my K6 just a bit too early, I would have loved to have built a K6-2 but the timing is what it is. I really loved the (Super) Socket 7 platform as it's what I cut my teeth on way back when, and I've always wanted to built a K6-2+. I think it's about time I finally did that. I've always felt that this chip would make the perfect late-DOS/Win98 gaming platform.
i went from pentium 233mmx to atlhon 700 and that was already a 4x+ improvement. i can only imagine what it was for you. good old slot k7. i really like slot cpus :(
This video is awesome mate. You answer every question I had/have about the CPUs of those times but I think the chipsets have a big influence on the benchmarks, I think.
Back in 99 ish . My childhood friend got a k6-2 350mhz , 64mb ram , Voodoo 3 3500 . Was all powerful and voodoo magic, but his gaming rig crashed all the time . My rig was a P2 333 mhz , 96mb ram , nvidia 256 annihilator pro 32ddr . And my rig neaver crashed or bs 😅 I miss the old days😢
I know that K6-III+ 550 is extremely rare and expensive nowadays but I have done cheap purchase. Overclocked K6-III+ 400@ 577 MHz and it rocks ! It have double cache L2 in compare to K6-2+.
Thanks for the video and the utilities for "plus" cpu. They will come in handy. The K6-III+ are easily to find on ebay than K6-2+ and relatively cheap, though they are low voltage parts. Unfortunately my K6-III+ is still on the way, somewhere in the depot :(
The lowest I managed to snag a GA-5AX for was $130 … nearly as much as I paid for my current desktop’s motherboard @.@ . I ended up getting inspired because I had a K6-2/450 and a K6-2/500 in a bin of parts I hadn’t opened in over 13 years. Was honestly kind of surprised when I put it all together and it just popped back to life. Now I gotta track down a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive to complete my build. They’re going for so darn expensive right now.
Just dug up an old windows 98 laptop that i used to play with as a kid ... turns out it has a K6-2 450 cpu , has 28MB of RAM and 5GB of storage , a floppy and even a cd-rom drive
back then i had no idea what it did but i knew it was old and outdated (i was born in 2001 for reference)
now im currently an Electrical Engineering student and happened to discover this old gem , still works perfectly fine
i wonder what i can do with it, i have wanted to tinker with old windows and dos for years and thought this laptop was gone ... thought my parents had thrown it out or gave it away but no... it was in our basement and it still works perfectly
thats why i clicked on this video , to find more about the K6-2 thats inside
Edit after watching: Kinda dissapointed to see that the K6-2 500 non-plus is on the same level as the PII 330 ... which makes my 450 on the same level as the PII 300 but i wasnt really expecting anything when I dug it up, i would have been happy even if it was a 386 or 486 system , whatever it is i am gonna do a lot of tinkering with it
definitely will play dos games , maybe trying to run tinycore linux on it , or maybe try to even program my own DOS game for it using C or C++ as Im quite familiar with both
Welcome to the awesome hobby of old PC games!
@@philscomputerlab One quick update :
(Edit: It was not quick at all, instead it was a long, LONG tangent)
It took me hours to figure out how to make it able to recognise my USB flash drive by way of installing an unofficial 3rd party driver by way of burning it on a cd in my modern computer , then I was finally able to finally able to download programs for it on my main computer and then simply transfer them over
I 've put a few games in it as well but havent tried them . For now i have been more focused on getting everything over and setting up productivity apps. It used to have MS office 2000 but it didnt work, the installation must have been corrupted somehow so I removed it and put MS Office XP instead , and it works perfectly, i installed a small pdf viewer (3 mb only) from that era and also Visual Studio 6.0 for programming ...
It feels insane to me that a computer with only 28 MEGABYTES of RAM can use a FULL MS Office suite that I can actually do most of what you would want from it , can read pdfs albeit a bit slowly , and I can actually do solid programming work on...
(Yes its a bit slow , yes I can do all these things with more comfort on a modern machine , with a bigger screen and resolution, and with internet connectivity ... but the fact that I can do any of that at all in such an old and underpowered machine in almost the same way as I would do in a modern PC is absolutely crazy to me)
In any case , now that I got all my productivity software in place... games are next... Im gonna have an absolute blast with this
And I will be honest ... the process of troubleshooting , spending hours to make everything work has been almost if not just as fun as actually using it (same with setting up my secondary desktop that runs linux a few months ago)
Am I some kind of masochist ?
Anyway this has been a long rant and I dont expect you to read any of it but If you are ... Thank you for actually creating content for these machines , I am fascinated by that era of computing and my journey exploring it has only just started
Something about the 250-500mhz range in CPUs are just so fun and I look back so fondly in this little niche despite the fact it was in 2005-2006 when I was dealing with these machines as those were what people were getting rid of for free. I mean you got slots, sockets, large half speed 512kb slot l2 or socketed full speed but half size cache. You had Celeron 300a’s able to outdo the exhorbantly priced p2 300 when oc’d. Also in this time the K6 one of the most intriguing cpu lines of all time for me.
I'm really glad I kept my super socket 7 system, and I upgraded it to K6-2+ a couple years ago. It seems just recently everying is catching up. I have a MSI board that doesn't properly support the k6-2+. When it was a k6-2, it said' Detected K6-2 CPU at 450Mhz, and then I run a K6-2+ at 600 Mhz, it says "Detected CPU at 20 Mhz". Yes, 20. But everything works, fine. There is a claimed newer BIOS I can flash, but I'm not risking bricking the thing just to fix the startup screen.
Hey, you should do a video on Socket 939. I have one I've been thinking about getting rid of, but who knows maybe I should hang on to it because it might be the next retro curve, who knows! I passed up TRS-80 MC-10 when they were on ebay for $5 or $10 going unsold, and then suddenly out of nowhere everyone wanted one and now some of them are $100.
I might do a video on flashing a SS7 board. If the chip is socketed and you have a flasher than it's super safe to try out. I think I have one board that I had to flash to get K6-2+ and K6-III+ support. I think I even paid for the BIOS file to download, it was one of these driver archive sites.
Got my K6-2+ 550MHz when they were widely available at price 5$. Then again, never have installed it, running K6-2 500MHz instead. That is already too fast for many retro games. Now knowing how easy the ”plus” is to underclock, I think I’ll give it a go...
Do it and set it at 600. It blows the doors off a K6-2. The K6-2 at higher speeds was bottlenecked by the slow L2 cache on the motherboard. Having a full-speed L2 on the chip and making the motherboard cache an L3 made a huge difference. It didn't do much for FPU performance, but the overall performance increase helped some. I got better FP numbers with the "plus" chips at the same speeds.
The K6-2+ is actually a reworked K6-III for Notebooks.
That k6speed.exe was created on 24th April 2001. It's not only my birthday, it is the exact date.
NIce video, to bad no celeron was in this test.
It's mindblowing that just disabling some memory takes a Pentium 2 class processor down to 386.
That turtle beach soundcard looks earily familiar to some C-media soundscard i bought in around 2002. The drivers was in chinese and often completely hanged the system on trying to install on win xp sp1. Sp1 was notorious for crashing, but still
I had a k6-2 500 which was great. Then I bought my mum a k6-2 550, and it bluescreened constantly until i underclocked it to 500MHz
James Pilcher, I also had this problem, and the same with a 450 had to downclock to 400. the mystery continues
had that problem with a gtx 970. took me 4 tries (9 months in total) to get my money back via RMA. fucking defective piece of garbage.
K6-2 550 (not K6-2+, just K6-2) was a steaming pile of crap. Factory overclocked. And not really any good anyway, because above 400 MHz, the 100 MHz cache speed from the motherboard bottlenecked the classic K6-2.
I had several K6-2+ and K6-III+ CPUs back in the day, and still have some of them. Those were fantastic and I was using them as late as about 2005, and longer than that in retro rigs, but the K6-2 stopped being competitive at the higher speeds. It needed fast cache.
@@GraveUypo noone is interested about your gtx 970 shit .If you don't have stories or examples from 90's or 2000's , just leave out of here.
Remarked CPU's were a problem. You're lucky it wasn't a Cyrix.
The K6 series' FPU was the bane of my 98. :p Never got a + with on chip L2, as I finally got a P3.
You know what. It's kind of mind boggling how we've come from a 180nm process in the K6 2 500/550 to the next gen Ryzen 4 being 5nm in 20 years. Even Gen 3 at 7nm is crazy.
5nm and smaller are not honest nanometers, no part of the transistor is 5nm. These are at best "5nm-equivalent" due to 3d stacking.
I had the K5 133, K6 166, K6-2 300, K6-3 450 and I really liked them all although as far as I remember they would not overclock the slightest (maybe run for 10 minutes, then BSOD or restart). I personally always bought AMD (still using AMD) but I never had a stable overclock on any chip... maybe unlucky or AMD really tight tolerances.
Bought my son a Intel DualCore 2.5 GHz and it was easily and stable with stock fan overclocked to 4.0 GHz (but it was a late model I guess) I think at that time I had AMD Athlon X2 5200 and it was way slower (then my son's overclocked DualCore)...
I had a K6-2 350 that ran stable at 400. I later bought a 500, and it wouldn’t even reach 550.
Went retro nuts almost a year ago, and reached the end of the line ...almost ,5 motherboards ,8 CPU's , several rams and 4+ gfx cards later, k6-2 + running at 633mhz , 768mb ram , alternating between Fx5200 nvidea card or 9000pro ati , 9000pro is more compatible , but the fx gets more fps in some newer games.
Can get games like X2 -the thread just in the realm of playeble, 24fps benchmark , heck even silent hunter 3 works pretty good on it :D (game from 2005), still got a 9700pro on its way, just trying to squeeze every bit of fps out of it (on windows XP)
if you were lucky enough to have one of the top tier super 7 boards with faster ata good AGP mosfets, and large TAG ram, K6-II/K6-III were a real gamechanger. P2 was nice, but prohibitavely expensive, and a well tuned K6-II/III with a solid motherboard could get you pretty close for most things, and actually faster for web browsing.
Had one I ran on a Asus P5A-b. 512 megs of ram. Wish I'd have kept it.
Bei der Sockel 7 Plattform hatte ich damals das ASUS p5a-b bis zu einem K6-3+ 550 aufgerüstet. Beim Arbeitsspeicher hatte ich Infineon Riegel mit 3x256MB. Die letzte Grafikkarte die in dem System lief war eine Voodoo5 5500 AGP gepaart mit einer Creative Sound Blaster Live Platinum. Die HDD war eine 4,3 GB Hitachi oder WD. War damals eine sehr teure Angelegenheit und ich musste die Taktraten sowie die Spannungen der CPU auf den Mainboard manuell Jumpern. Das war schon nervig.
Nice. What about some chiptunes Phil?
I worked in the industry at that time and this was a TERRIBLE processor for a new system :(. It was ~$120, more than brand new K7 platform Duron and Coppermine Celerons. I was selling 3-7 Coppermine Celeron 533-766@800-1000 systems a week to Very happy gamer customers :). Later added K7 Durons@950 to the mix when someone found how to pencil unlock.
Even mendocino celerons in 2000 overclocked great, late 366s @550 with 0.1V bump on cheapest 440BX boards, and they were ~$60 new. Made for great budget builds.
Too bad you dont include 300A@450MHz in your benchmark comparisons :( it would reveal how "great" K6-2 was ;)
All the results are done on the same machine and can be compared!
You got that right 100%. K6s were awful besides their price tag, and even that was nullified by the "much better in every single possible way" Mendocino Celerons by late 1998. Why there's so much love for K6s, I don't get it.
Your memory must be failing you. The benchmarks in the video show K6-2+ runs about at PII-400 speed.
Heckin' sweet 386 board with the EISA slot!
If i remember correctly, i had an AMD k6-2 500mhz system once.... that cpu ran so hot, you could warm up a small room.
funny thing it was 17w chip. so... lower tdp than some mobile cpus of today.
Hello!!
I only say hello when I'm early enough, I hope it's not a problem!
Oh man, I remember when Pentium 2 was the shit. It was so fast compared to our old 486. Lol.
Oh, I remember seething green over a friend's PentiumPro 200MHz.... compared to my "fast" 486, now THAT was the shit. :)
i fondly remember my first Supermicro P6SBA board, with Pentium II 450Mhz when the 450mhz had just come out - i upgraded to it from my old Packard Bell DX2-66... the best upgrade of my life i think! i was still running windows 3.1 in 1997 i think LOL i HATED the fact that win95 "Took over" DOS 6.22 so i held out for a long time, and i ran alot of DOS software, ran my own BBS etc i remember i ran some sort of multitasking DOS version near the end and it was wild... being able to run many different DOS processes and jumping around between them
I remember seeing a Pentium Pro without a heat-sink and thinking to myself just how cool it looked: a huge 'slab' of gold, such as you'd see in a museum or secret Egyptian tomb. Then I went back to my Cyrix and thought well..er..at least it's gold-looking xD
I had the 486 dx4 100, and upgraded to the k62 500, it was blazing fast compared to the dx4.
Back in 2000 I had a Pentium 233MMX and had no upgrade path because of Slot1. So I bought the K6-III/400. Its the "bad" core with 2,4V. Later I found the K6-III/450 with 2,2V for a few bucks in a garagesale together with an ASUS P5A-B and P5A.
@Phil: Can you add the K6-III to your benchmarks?
So cool. My first New PC was a DX40. Actually a Commodore 64
Huh? I thought they topped out at 450MHz. Back in 'the day' I bought a whole series of AMD 486 and K6 chips. AMD 486/33, 50, 80, and 120. Then K6-2/300 and 450. and finally a K6-3/450. The -3 chips gained tremendous IPC and ran ~40% faster than an equally clocked K6-2 on the games I was playing at the time.
Good! Keep it up!
Between 1998 - 2006 I used AMD CPUs exclusively (and for the 2001 - 2006 period, I don't regret it one bit). However, in recent years, as my retro passion (translated: insanity) has grown, I started to understand WHY Intel Pentium II CPUs were so expensive back then. There's just no competition in performance and stability... these things paired with a 440BX chipset are rock solid. And I don't mean just game performance, no. Even the operating system simply behaves differently, feels MUCH snappier on a Pentium II compared to an AMD K6-2/3(+) CPU. As for the unique capability that the K6-2/3+ CPUs have... I found that, at least in my case, I don't really need it. I can play any game I want even on a fast Pentium 3 machine. Heck, even when I used a Core 2 Duo retro PC I was able to play most of the DOS games that I like (Prince, Historik, Duke3D, Quake DOS - even Monkey Island worked on the Core2 for some strange reason that I still don't understand). That being said, I do have 3 x AMD K6-2+ CPUs & motherboard combos, and I enjoy playing with them from time to time. :D
Yea a system with 440BX chipset is really nice...
I went from a K6-2 500 / GA-5AA to a Celeron 433 / VIA133A on the same GF2 MX in early 2003, the latter was so much faster that it was night and day difference. Warcraft 3 went from a Powerpoint slideshow to playable.
@B3ro1080 , because the Core 2 Duo CPU is way too fast and because there aren't any "hardware" solutions to slow it down. Well, you can slow it down by disabling the L1 cache, which basically will make it too slow. So you are stuck with software throttling solutions, which sometimes work, but even when they work, you will most likely face some weird issues (at least in my experience). The most common problem for many games is the fact that Adlib / digital speech are not properly initiated, so the game will revert to using the PC Speaker. Other times the game won't even start at all (either because of the turbo pascal 200 error, or some different error caused by excessive speed). Anyway, this is a very vast discussion, with a lot of nuances. :-)
@B3ro1080 I can assure you, the overclocked Celeron 300A was trading blows with a Pentium 2 450 MHz and many times it would beat it :-)
@B3ro1080 Of course, I'm talking about cases where you use a SB Pro / SB16 compatible card (such as the Yamaha YMF7x4 cards, Sound Blaster Live, Audigy 2 ZS) :-) The issue is not the card, it's the CPU. But, as I said, with certain motherboards/CPUs/sound card combinations, you get very good results nonetheless, somehow the speed issues seem to be avoided (almost).
As for the horror stories regarding the Celeron, well, many of them are true. But the Celeron 300A is an exception, it's probably the best value CPU that ever existed.
No racing game like Screamer 2 and Screamer Rally, I love them
My socket 7 board is the Gigabyte GA-586VX and it can only accept a first generation K6 200mhz cpu -- is that one capable of the same features as the K6-2?? re: the ability to control the speed etc??
Great video Phil, I agree the AMD CPU is awesome but really tough to find a good motherboard
I have the best SS7 motherboard ever made for sale if you're interested. Mint condition, with a K6-III CPU installed and a spare identical K6-III in the packaging still (bought a bunch of spares).
Calling on-die cache "L1 cache" was not a rebranding of cache. Initially, cache for all x86 CPUs was intended only for Instruction-fetch caching (i-cache). W/o branch prediction, pre-fetching 32 or 64 or more at a time in advance of when they're being requested by the CPU is a win. i-caches as small as a few KBs is win. This been referred to L1, whether on-die or external. Later CPUs with branch prediction can do better at improving cache hit ratios. It was realized by the end of the 386 era that many workloads were working on 64KB or more of contiguous data. In the 486 era, small L1/i-caches were brought on-die while users could increase their performance by adding L2 external cache (aka, d-cache). The Pentium era brought the L2 cache on-die for performance reasons. Today, many CPUs also have very, very large on-die L3 cache. Server-grade x86-64 CPUs have many MBs or GBs and are soon predicted to have TBs of cache.
I still have my ga-5ax along an asus p5a, they were good at the day.
I just thought that my upgrade plan was very flawed, not only I upgraded from a k62 350 to a 550 but also I picked the wrong card for the job as I got a kyro 2 32mb, I loved every feature but I enjoyed more when I switched to a duron 1300 as performance with rtcw were horrible with k6 2
I saw you posting a screenshot from this video on Reddit the other day! Lol
Haha, yes that was from this video :)
I must add something for those who are into k6-cpu. A k6-2+ 570 can be easily overclocked to 630mhz stable.
With a fsb of 115, write combining enabled, Ali agp utilities installed, ga-5ax bios fine tuned, 128mb of cl2 ram (yes that's a lot of tweak) my system equals or beat most of the score of the non GPU related scores of the P2 450 of this video (I don't have a GeForce 2).
It's an incredibly cool CPU that's around the performance of the mighty P2. My biggest regret is that not a lot of games uses 3d now! optimisations, that would have crushed Intel price/performance wise back then
@@jeremyhussein5649 What I found is that these CPUs tend to require higher voltages to get to 600, but can do 550 or thereabouts quite easily. I recommend to aim for a high FSB as that gives you the most boost but don't click beyond 550.
@@philscomputerlab yes, I use 0.1v boost to get mine perfectly stable. The 550mhz version is not a great overclocker, while the 570 acz can run at 633mhz easily. With that setting I get 56 fps in PC player, 42fps in quake , both at 640x480 and 169fps in doom. With a voodoo 3 3000 at 3500 clocks its a really great 1998/99 era of gaming machine. Most games run between 50/60 fps at 800x600. Half life gets down to 30fps sometimes but the overall experience is awesome. But yeah with the absurd prices of a good ss7 MB and a good cpu its far cheaper and easier to get a slot 1 setup. With all the tweaks and tuning you can squeeze something like 20fps and that the fun thing With this CPU.
Can you put used in video music in the description!?
Love my K6-III 450 clocked at 550mhz but i am sad it did not at least keep up with the 450mhz intel.
not supported on my mother board :( but i have had it up to 600mhz
The main board i am running on my K6-III+ is a MSI MS-5169 ALi Aladdin V Chip set it did not support the K6-III at first but lucky me there was a Bios Update.
the 450mhz was the best
@Robbi Robson I guess it was VIA MVP3 :)
@@Mr_Meowingtons I have some Gigabyte GA-5AA boards based on ALi Aladdin V and they are awesome. FSB up to 140 MHz and multi up to x6. I did stable OC on my K6-III+ 400 @ 577 MHz 2.1V
I think you should have included the K6-III 450 in this comparison, I was expecting to see a " +clock speed VS +cache" battle.
I may have already told this story under some other Phil's video. I've tried the K6-2+ once. I had (and still have) an Asus P/I-P55T2P4 mobo with P233MMX running at 291 MHz, a wonderful SIMM-driven mid-90s Socket-7 mobo. One day I stumbled upon a manual on THG explaining step by step how to shoehorn a K6-2+ 500 into what's basically a Pentium-only board using some easy tricks. And so I did. Since the highest CPU multiplier for Socket-7 is 6x it runs at 6x83. It required cherry-picking the right components that would run happily at 41,5 MHz PCI speed but it turned out to be a complete success... at least until I ran the benchmarks ;) The results are kinda okay but at the same time somewhat disappointing. Even though the system absolutely flies under Windows 98 and 2000, feels nippy and very responsive, in particular applications it's noticeably slower than on overclocked yet still significantly lower clocked Pentium MMX it replaced. After testing the whole thing thorougly in practice in various games I came to a conclusion that the SLI Voodoo2 setup I put in gets awfully bored as the system fails to feed the cards with data fast enough. The only good thing about such configuration is that it runs games at 1024x768 giving great image quality on 'modern' 15" LCDs, albeit being stuck in 15-30 FPS range depending on title. Let's just say that I had better experience with the original Unreal, NFS Porsche 2000 or MiG-29 Fulcrum on other systems. The results don't improve much with lowering the resolution so it's definitely CPU/RAM/MOBO that's lagging behind. Hell, sometimes I think a Pentium II 233 with a Voodoo1 I had around 1998 ran games faster at 640x480 but I may be exaggerating, idolizing my high school period PC. An interesting experience nevertheless, I highly recommend such experiments to those who enjoy upgrades for the sake of having fun benchmarking and comparing stuff :)
i can't install windows 98 on my ga 5ax, it shows Message SU991016 Unknown error, and later i got further but when i tried to boot it, it locked up
and why is my pentium mmx 233 showing as a 166 mhz on boot, it may be that my ga 5ax is funky or that i didn't configure it right
Nowadays Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 are rare and expensive on eBay. I bought a DFI Super Socket 7 motherboard with black traces for cheap on a french classifed avertising, but I still could not find a Socket 7 for a reasonable price...
Then I get second!
Time to watch the videoooooo...andshititisbedtime.
I will watch after I finish work tomorrow.
My first pc was a 486 DX4, what a good pc... I used to play Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Wacky Wheels, Terminal Velocity, Sim City 2000
Mine was a dx4-100, then upgraded to the k62-500, huge difference.
I remember something like MTRR caching policy set for k6-2 cpus to not evict cache by framebuffer region of the video graphic card, I remember that there was some boost in performance by doing this.
I had a k6-2 550, I should search for it in my storage if I can find it, and check if it's a k6-2 or k6-2+. As far as I remembered, It was working, and I left to upgrade to an athlon xp 2600+
holy shit, quite a gap in between your upgrades, huh. i can only imagine the suffering.
K6-2+ 500 2.0v is $17 on ebay and the K6-3+ 400 1.6v is over $60 shipped... I currently have a K6-2 550... should I get the K6-2+? I could also pick up a K6-III 400mhz for cheap locally (like $2)
I'd keep looking for a cheaper K6-3+ 400, just got to be a bit patient.
On an AOPEN X59 Pro motherboard with the latest BIOS the CPU Internal Cache line in BIOS is conspicuously missing. Using SETMUL's L1D/L2D (disabling both L1 and L2 cache) replicate this BIOS setting though I believe?
Have you found any uses for disabling one level of internal cache while leaving the other enabled? In my experiments it seems like disabling L2 alone doesn't actually have any affect on the speed and that while you can disable one and leave the other on it's really just an on/off that requires you to disable or enable L1 to see any results.
InfiniteClouds YesI have that same board, just use setmul.
InfiniteClouds AFAIK it toggles l1 and l2 together.
The Pentium pro (and II) allowed you to cache the video framebuffer. This allowed you to run Quake in 640x480 in framerates comparable to 320x200 on a normal Pentium. The K6 did have the L2 cache but didn't have any tools to be setup like the Pentium pro. Shame!
It should have been named the Pentium Pro II.
You should review the K5 PR166
I remember I owned an IBM Cyrix 233. Then I got a pentium 166mmx which was a lot better. Then a K6 2 500mhz maybe, not sure about the clock speed.
i had the non + chip. a 450. overcloced it to 517 or something odd. good cheap chip back in the day. didnt they make these + for a very limited time? like the k6 III took over or something and they didnt make many of teh II+ chips i think.
absolutely not
1:30 omfg that's my mobo and my cpu (well, the same exact models i had in 1997). i can't believe i recognized them instantly just by seeing them. i didn't even open my case that much back then.
I don't think SP97-XV can be qualified for a super socket 7 board, because it lacks the support for 100MHz bus that is essential for being an SS7.
lazibayer Yea it's a regular Socket 7
If we had all the youtube reviews we have today back in 2000 they would come to the conclusion that games are not optimised for AMD cpus.... how times have not changed!
not really, it would be more of a fx series situation. except the k6 was kinda worth it regardless of being so bad.
The original K6 scaled like crap. It was more competitive in lower clocks but it just didn't keep pace. The + is thankfully somewhat better.
The K6 was awful in gaming performance and general stability versus the Pentium 2, but it justified itself by its dirt low price tag. After the Celeron 300A came out which is basically P2 performance at K6 prices there's pretty much NO reason to get a K6 anymore.
As far as integer units go, K6 and Pentium II are almost the same in term of general architecture, they both are superscalar out-of-order x86 processors (thus it's not wrong to consider K6 a Pentium II class processor), except Pentium II had better FPU (it's possibly of two-way superscalar out-of-order design which was unbeatable at least until the K7 came along and smashed the Intel Pentium III and 4 processors in FPU benchmark). The only handicap K6 had was a scalar in-order FPU.
and the fact it has no level 2 cache onboard
4:47 WoW as I remember it it was total crap on Quake 1
@B3ro1080 the same, strangely enough quake 2 GL worked fine, on the same system with Voodoo 2
The day after I got my K6-2 500's motherboard (Gigabyte GA-5AA, the baby AT version) repaired+my AT PSU, this video pops up. I should probably start building up my SS7 collection, because the motherboard supports *everything* ever designed for Socket 5, 7 and S7 without requiring any BIOS update (beta or otherwise).
Edit: Glad to see its not a K6-2 550 BTW-those things were most of the time worse than a K6-2 450.
Edit 2: BTW, if anyone knows of a safe way to remove corrosion from IDE headers, could you please tell me of it? Because they are the only part of my SS7 board with corrosion and as a result I can only boot from the FDD.
I would recommend a brass brush. The brass would be harder than the corrosion, but less hard than the pins. Then you could turn the motherboard upside and and blow it out with compressed air.
Also consider using Isopropyl alcohol. If this all makes no difference, simply purchase a PCI IDE/SATA controller! Though you might want to look around on Phil's channel and in other places to research compatibility with the OS you wish to use.
I'll try both of those methods. And space is a premium on the board since its so small (1x AGP, 4x Expansion), so I really don't want to have to add a storage controller to it. Because I need room for a Riva 128ZX, 2x voodoo2 12MB, Intel 100B NIC and a rather large AD1848KP SoundPort soundcard.
In what way were the K6-2 550's worse than the 450's? I used to have a K6-550... when I first bought it, the chip was bad as it ran waaay too hot. The PC tech I went to at the time (I was like, 12) said it was better to underclock it just a bit and put it on 500 MHz. A year later I got into OC'ing and tried to run the chip at 550 MHz anyway, went without a hitch. A few years ago I even tried to run it at 600 Mhz. That was a bit much unfortunately. Aaah retro PC hardware, fond memories :).
The fact that to get the best out of the majority of K6-2 550 you had to underclock it to 500MHz, combined with the performance difference between the 500 and 550 being smaller than that of the 450 compared to the 500. In the same motherboard.
That Pentium II 300 , highest powerdraw, is because it's old version of first Pentium II line Klamath 350nm? While rest of them are Deschutes?
I suggest pair with the newer 100mhz mother board👍
I did.
I prefer to cook coffee on the K2 (I uploaded a vid in 2008) xD
Quake II results look a bit odd, I had two systems back in the day, a K6-2 500 and a P-II 350, using the same GPU the K6-2 was always faster in Quake 2 using the 3Dnow extensions...
Used a K6-2 450 for a while. Made me long for my temporarily unavailable P3-450. On the K6-2, WinXP was sluggish and anything that required math was likely to freeze up. Finally couldn't stand it any longer and scrounged up a P4. Oh, what a relief!
Haha... Next time I'm stuck between regular PCs, I'll dredge up a temporary from a better grade of dumpster. :)
XP ran pretty slick on my P3-450, and was acceptable on a P2-233. But on the K6-2? Painful.
Had Win9x on K6 and K6-2 CPUs, was always disappointed by their performance compared to P233 on the same board. For contrast, I have W2K on a dual Xeon 750 with 2GB RDRAM and SCSI HDs, and man does it FLY (at least once it gets past Compaq's sloggy BIOS, slowest I've ever seen). No idea what I'll ever need W2K for, but that setup is just too good to dump. Besides, the hardware used to belong to Jerry Pournelle (it's his old "Regina").
Tellya what you don't want to run W2K on.... I have a 486DX4-100 that I use for testing old RAM, because it's totally not-fussy and supports any 30 or 72 pin you throw at it (swings both ways). Also use it for testing old HDs, cuz its hardware detection is really fast. One day I hooked up the wrong HD and found myself watching W2K booting up. On a 486, that at the time had 8MB of RAM. (Yes, 8 _megabytes_ .) Apparently tho W2K won't _install_ on a 486, it _runs_ just fine... it took about 5 minutes to reach the desktop, but after that it was actually usable -- Office97 was a little sluggish but not terrible (and that despite having no swapfile, cuz that had been on another disk). Better than XP on the K6-2 with 512mb RAM!! I should try it again someday with more RAM and see how it does.
Not originally. But over time I became an Intel bigot, and for that AMD has only themselves to blame; Intels were more stable and less buggy.(And when I was regularly vetting salvage, I encountered occasional dead AMDs, but never saw a dead Intel, even after severe thermal abuse).
And rebooting is against my religion. :)
K6-III
Especially the K6-III 450MHz.
Back in the day, I built a system around that chip, and it was such a wonderful machine !
It ran for about 6 years straight, first as my main computer, and it later served my dad for a number of years. 6 years might not seem a very long time these days, but back then, this was a very long time for one system to be still useful.
I so loved that little machine, but somehow it got lost along the way. :(
Phrea Nix Yea, that was a great CPU :) And the next one was a K7 of course :)
Nowadays you can use 10 year old CPUs and they are still fine for most of the games (most are more or less playable).
Dude, why you not to build the new K6-III based system?:) It's kinda rare and expensive, but 10 years later it will be even more.
Back in that time I had Pentium 233 MMX on intel ATX motherboard (AN430TX), and it was much more hopeless. No AGP, no 66+ bus.. All the direct3d games (Carmageddon II, NFS3, NFS4) run at 10 fps with PCI Rage3D II+. I played 320x240 or 400x300 with software render mode :) I think k6 would be much nicer choise but then I had no idea.
A Rage II DVD + or even Rage IIc is a poor 3D accelerator.I know I had the Rage IIc integrated on a motherboard. A Voodoo 1 or 2 or Voodoo Banshee,RIVA 128 etc would do wonders on a Pentium 233 Mhz MMX Machine.
And the prices on SS7 hardware just went up again, inb4 it is like Apple stock price wise.
Hi Phil are you planning on ever doing a slot A build? Not many people going that route but I find that platform interesting. First athlon processors and the first cpu to break 1ghz were on slot A.
Xibalba i had a slot a when they where new. They had so many heat issues.
Don't think so, I haven't been able to find anything and will just go with Socket A.
Can you adjust the multiplier on the fly on a regular K6-2 as well?
Elmer No you can't I'm afraid.
I was there, it was 9000 years ago.
I have a rig with k6-2 550mhz with the Ati 7000 64mb... Im searching for a better gpu for this cpu