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AMD K6 2 350 overclock

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Hi - I am pretty fresh to this myself, but I recently overclocked a k6-2+ 450 to 550. i am certain that more experienced members will have more insight, however...

I would start by reviewing all discussion threads with reference to overclocking k6-2's and also the CPU database from the overclockers home page to see where the limits of your chip may be. It would appear that the K6-2 350 can get to 400 or faster depending on the motherboard. You are on the right track increasing voltage although 2.2 or 2.3 seems to be satisfactory for most 350's to hit 400 with stability and a multiplier of 4x. ("Danger-Will-Robinson" voltage appears to be 3.0v) I suspect, however, that your issue is with the motherboard, and that you may want to look into updating your bios to a version that supports higher speeds, although this may not exist.

I found the bios page from IBM for your motherboard
http://www-1.ibm.com/servlet/support/manager?rs=0&rt=0&org=psg&doc=MNOK-3ZHM5R



but, your bios may be the latest made for it, I don't know.
Good luck.




:beer:
 
Zap,
Thanks for the site. I will download it. I appreciate the help.
 
It seem like your board limited you to 350 max as show in the link you post. The last section.
I might be wrong.
:)
 
First of all, Welcome to the forums.

That being said, let's get to the challenge.

Unlike the K6III's, the K6-2's are not known to overclock very well. Although I have no experience with that particular motherboard, I've been successful with the K6 line of CPUs in the past. I've had a K6III+450 up to 616MHz until I let the smoke out of it, and still have a K6III 350 out there running at 450MHz. There may be some hope for you.

Keep in mind that there are no guarantees, there is always a certain amount of risk involved, especially when compared to the later offerings from both Intel and AMD. Also don't expect PIII or T-BIRD performance from that aging platform.

Now down to business. After a quick look at the link for your motherboard, I can see that it will support several different FSB settings, 66 through 100MHz. These settings would be located at "SW3 (B3 & B4)". From what I can surmise, these would be DIP switches.

According to the chart there are multiplier choices ranging from 2.5X through 5.5X. These would be set at "SW2 (B1, B2 & B3)".

Voltage can be set by "SW2 (B4 through B8)". This may be a problem depending on what the default voltage of you CPU is, I'm guessing that your default is 2.4V, which isn't available on that board. The next setting is 2.8V. At that setting, I think you're beginning to push the limit. Watch your cooling!

This brings up another issue, heat. A motherboard that old probably doesn't have any method to monitor the temperatures, you have to take it a little at a time. When you get to a point where you have the heat related symptoms, lock ups, blue screens unexplained errors etc, it's time to revisit your cooling. The factory hsf is not going to be enough to keep the temperatures manageable once you start to increase the voltage. I would suggest that you upgrade to a socket A hsf from the later DURON/T-BIRD CPU's. I've had good results with the Global Win FOP32, it's worth a look if you have the room around the socket for clearance.

As mentioned above, look for a more current BIOS, this can cure a lot of problems.

I think that you can reasonably expect 400MHz with relative ease, make sure that you look at the cooling. If you continue to have problems attaining a higher clock speed, try lowering the FSB speed a bit, a 95MHz FSB at 4X will yield a clock speed of 380MHz, and you may find that you're able to hit 4.5*95 (428MHz).

And lastly, keep an eye on how much money you invest into this endeavor. No matter how fast you get the processor to go, you're still going to be saddled by the slower memory, hard drives and other peripherals on that aging socket 7 platform. A new socket A motherboard along with a DURON processor can be had for not much more than a few upgrades to an old system. Even a low end DURON system will give you blistering performance compared to whatever you can get out of your current system. Building an inexpensive system based on the newer socket A platform will also give you a viable upgrade path to well over 1G.

Good Luck!
 
I overclocked a K6-2 350 to 412 on an old j-mark TX chipset board, so it is definitely do-able. I used an old hsf off of a Duron 600 on it for cooling, using some arctic silver 2 for thermal goop and jacked up the vcore to 2.6 or 2.8 volts. I also have it running on a 75 mhz bus speed because that old chipset doesn't support a 100 fsb, using a 5.5 multplier. Good luck with your overclock!:D
 
Wow. Good stuff here. I have got to 373 voltage using the SW3 jumper set. Any combination with SW2 will almost get into windows and freeze, or will not not boot at all. Is this because of heat issues? I have tinstalled an extra fan up front however. Should i have to chage the voltage on the SW3 (B1)? This is fun stuff!!! :D
 
Kudos on your first attempt at the "black art" of overclockling!

Have you upgraded the hsf? I can't emphasize enough the importance of an effective cooling solution. Put simply, "better cooling = better results!"

I thought the voltage settings were at "SW2 (B4 through B8)".
I may be wrong, study the manual. What is your default voltage? I believe that this is the area that may be holding you back. Just remember, go cautiously, a little at a time. If your CPU's default voltage is 2.4V, the next setting of 2.8V is pretty substantial. Make sure that you have adequate cooling.

Keep in mind that if you buy quality socket A hsf, you can take it with you when you move up the ladder to your next computer. Money spent in this area isn't necessarily wasted.

Good Luck!
 
I was just trying to OC an AMD k6 350 MHz machine today (VIA Apollo VP3 Chipset, DFI P5BV3+ mobo). It's been sitting in the corner of my office for months now, and thought I'd put it to good use (I'm a SETI cruncher:))... ouch, was it slow.

Anyway, I was able to get up to 400 MHz, but I couldn't even boot at 450 MHz. The voltage range is 2.2-2.4V (default setting 2.2V), but raising it didn't help.

Wasn't perfectly stable at 400 MHz either -- blue screen o' death (NT4) happened not long after starting up the SETI CLI client. I did notice it shaved an hour off my processing time, but 27 hrs compared to 28 hrs...sheesh, big deal! Seems a lot slower than it ought to be.
 
My K6-2's board (MSI-5184) has the same chipset and my times are ~25 hours at 5.5 X 100mhz, 23 hours at 5 X 112mhz. I'd up the fsb first if I were you.
 
eobard said:
My K6-2's board (MSI-5184) has the same chipset and my times are ~25 hours at 5.5 X 100mhz, 23 hours at 5 X 112mhz. I'd up the fsb first if I were you.
As far as I can tell, the fsb is limited to 100 MHz on my mobo, and according to the jumpers it was "factory" set at 100 MHz. I set the multiplier to 4, but that's as high as I could get it.
 
Coriolis said:
As far as I can tell, the fsb is limited to 100 MHz on my mobo, and according to the jumpers it was "factory" set at 100 MHz. I set the multiplier to 4, but that's as high as I could get it.

Sorry on that. I assumed that with the same chipset our boards would have the same fsb options, mine has 3 settings above 100mhz. Maybe getting softfsb would help. I don't have a link but I know someone here put up a link to it recently, perhaps a search of the boards for "softfsb" would steer you in the right direction.
 
eobard said:


Sorry on that. I assumed that with the same chipset our boards would have the same fsb options, mine has 3 settings above 100mhz. Maybe getting softfsb would help. I don't have a link but I know someone here put up a link to it recently, perhaps a search of the boards for "softfsb" would steer you in the right direction.
I have sucessfully used CPUFSB on my Intel-based machines. So I found the PLL info on the DFI board, looked up the possible FSB settings for this PLL, but it only goes up to 100 MHz. My PLL is made by ICS (9148 model I think)... perhaps you have a PLL with a wider range of FSB settings. But looks like I'm SOL. :(
 
Good stuff, but thats one of my problems. My mobo wont let my FSB go over 100Mhz. Maybe im limited to 373. :(
 
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