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Question on K6-2 ???

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BIG-O-2

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Joined
Jul 30, 2001
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I have a sister that has a K6-2 made by HP (complete machine).
I was wanting to know what is the top cpu for K6-2, I never messed with these. I started in Durons and old Pentiums.

Please help
 
550mhz for a K6-2 I believe that "mobile" cooler K6-III was only offered in flavors up to 500mhz but could OC to 600mhz..
 
AMD K6-2 & K6-3 (1998)

AMD was a busy little company at the time Intel was playing around with their Pentium II's and Celerons. In 1998, AMD released the K6-2. The "2" shows that there are some enhancements made onto the proven K6 core, with higher speeds and higher bus speeds. They probably were also taking a page out of the Pentium "2" book. The most notable new feature of the K6-2 was the addition of 3DNow technology. Just as Intel created the MMX instruction set to speed multimedia applications, AMD created 3DNow to act as an additional 21 instructions on top of the MMX instruction set. With software designed to use the 3DNow instructions, multimedia applications get even more boost. Using 3DNow, larger L1 cache, on-die L2 cache and Socket 7 usability, the K6-2 gained ranks in the market without too much trouble. When used with Socket 7 boards that contained L2 cache on board, the integrated L2 cache on the processor made the motherboard cache considered L3 cache.

The K6-3 processor was basically a K6-2 with 256 KB of on-die L2 cache. The chip could compete well with the Pentium II and even Pentium III's of the early variety. In order to eek out the full potential of the processor core, though, AMD fine tuned the limits of the processor, leading the K6-2 and K6-3 to be a bit picky. The split voltage requirements were pretty rigid, and as a result AMD held a list of "approved" boards that could tolerate such fine control over the voltages. Processor cooling was also an important issue with these chips due to the increased heat. In that regard, they were a bit like the Cyrix 6x86MX processors.

heres a link to a site with abit more on production and stuff as well.
http://www.penstarsys.com/editor/AMD/amd2.htm
 
demon-eater, you are wrong about the on-die L2 cache for the K6-2 as they have none. The only K6 series that have on-die L2 cache is the K6-3, which has 256k of on-die L2, and the 2 mobile procs that AMD came out with towards the end of development of the K6-x series. Those are the K6-3+, with 256k of on-die L2 and the K6-2+, which has 128k of on-die L2. That is probably what messed you up about the L2 cache on K6-2. Both the K6-3+ and K6-2+ were the only K6-x series of procs to be built on the .18 micron process; they were used by AMD to proof the process for Athlon. BTW, the K6-2+ and K6-3+ were built for mobile use and are picky on what mobo they will run in, but if your board supports them they give good performance. I found that they are roughly comparable to the performance of a P3 of roughly the same speed and might be slightly faster than a Celeron of the same speed in a lot of apps.
 
The AMD K6-3+ 500MHz CPUs were as powerful as Duron 600MHz CPUs. Unfortuneatly, only few were made and one would need an ASUS P5A motherbaord to get the most performance outa the thing.

Those 500MHz K6-3+ CPUs were indeed mobile processors and thus made them extremely hard to find. What most people did was overclock these suckers to 600MHz+ back then on aluminum and 700MHz nowadays with all the copper heatsinks floating about.

Dont forget that the + series K6 CPUs are manufactured on .18 micron technology with enhanced 3Dnow! technology which today is found in all AMD Athlon processors.


OC-Master
 
OC master what are the chances of the HP unit my sis has of running a 500mhz K6 of any veriaty?

And will I get some more performance with a 500 K6-2?

The chip right now is a 333 K6-2 I think.
 
BIG-O-2 said:
OC master what are the chances of the HP unit my sis has of running a 500mhz K6 of any veriaty?

And will I get some more performance with a 500 K6-2?

The chip right now is a 333 K6-2 I think.

Well lets see, a K6-2 333MHz CPU runs using a 95MHz FSB (95 x 3.5) and thus means you've got a 100MHz FSB compatible motherboard.

A K6-2 550MHz can still be purchased from most venders for less than $50 US ($80 Canadian) and costs alot less then a whole upgrade.

Before purchasing a faster CPU, I would recommened looking for a mobile K6-2+ or K6-3+ CPU. These CPUs are very overclockable and 600MHz can be attained even on old fashioned motherboards. To attain 600MHz, one simply sets the multiplier to 2X which corrisponds to 6X internal which means the processor will then run at 100 X 6.

Simple stuff and bringing your system to 600MHz can be a snap. So look for the + CPUs and see what kind of luck they can bring.


OC-Master
 
Upgrading that CPU will make a good difference, depending on the applications she's running. If all she's doing is listening to MP3s and some Word and Excel documents, then no, it's not really worth it, unless you can find it really cheap. If she's into some kind of gaming, or she's watching videos, or doing graphics or video editing, then do change it, it'll only make the computer better. As for getting the best of the best, watch out not to get tricked with the high pricing. True, a K6-3 is good, but when you must pay in the 50-80 $$ USD for it, then you'd better buy a cheap Duron CPU and mobo, which could later be upgraded to a faster CPU, while using the same mobo. Cuz the K6-X family didn't scale too well in the higher MHz, while the K7 starts at 500 or 600MHz and continues to over 1.8GHz (I can't count the 2400+ and above, cuz they're not widely available yet).

Be sure her motherboard supports 100MHz FSB CPUs. Some K6-2s are running on a 66MHz FSB, and sometimes, these 66MHz FSB coming from OEMs come shipped with a cheaper older mobo that doesn't support the 100 or more FSB.

A good place to find some deals on K6-2 processors are these forums. From time to time, you'll see someone post a k6-2 offer with a good price, say about 20-30 bux or less for a 500+ MHz chip. Just be sure to shop around, and not jump on the first deal you see, cuz it may not be the best one.

OC-Master -- sorry to say this, but a Duron mops the floor with a K6-3+ in almost everything, because of the advanced system bus, the enhancements in the K7 architecture over the K6's, etc.

UPDATE : linkages to support my statements : (I'm sorry to link to such a disgusting site :D) http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/99q1/990223/index-04.html this is a K6-3 benchmark, compared to a K6-2, Celeron, Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 (Katmai).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q2/000619/duron-08.html Sorry, couldn,t find a direct comparasion between a K6-3 and a Duron :(
 
Last edited:
Yeah, K6-3, k6-3+ and K6-2+ CPUs are fetching some really ridiculous prices for the performance they afford. Even K6-2-550s are getting expensive as a knock on effect.

Here's a reasonable price on a 500Mhz one though....
http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=K62500AFX-N
$26

If your board will only do 66Mhz or 75Mhz tops then save some money and get the 400Mhz one, (click CPUs section at side to see all they've got)


Big socket A and Socket 370 coolers do wonders for K6-2s, even the cheapest ones. The state of the art coolers when these chips were new gave marginal overclocks, 50mhz or so, but with a cheap socket A lump you can usually get 100Mhz on anything better than a 350 (333s were notoriously terrible overclockers, I've got two and only managed to squeeze a stable 375 out of one with the application of a large 60mm blown sink and ASIII and I had to "decap" it, which is a trick that allows better thermal contact between the CPU core an the heatsink)

regards,

Road Warrior
 
I picked up a K6-2 533 for $30.00 shipped from our classifieds, not a bad deal. I've seen some K6-2+ 550's on ebay go for around $35.00, but that would only be with sniping, silly people are constantly raising the bids afr beyond what they are really worth. When you see that you could get a K6-2+ from Tiger Direct for less than the current bids for one on ebay, and the bidding isn't over yet, you know it will be bad.
Big -O-2, check if your sisters computer is listed here http://k6plus.50megs.com/compatlist/
 
minoukat said:
Upgrading that CPU will make a good difference, depending on the applications she's running. If all she's doing is listening to MP3s and some Word and Excel documents, then no, it's not really worth it, unless you can find it really cheap. If she's into some kind of gaming, or she's watching videos, or doing graphics or video editing, then do change it, it'll only make the computer better. As for getting the best of the best, watch out not to get tricked with the high pricing. True, a K6-3 is good, but when you must pay in the 50-80 $$ USD for it, then you'd better buy a cheap Duron CPU and mobo, which could later be upgraded to a faster CPU, while using the same mobo. Cuz the K6-X family didn't scale too well in the higher MHz, while the K7 starts at 500 or 600MHz and continues to over 1.8GHz (I can't count the 2400+ and above, cuz they're not widely available yet).

Be sure her motherboard supports 100MHz FSB CPUs. Some K6-2s are running on a 66MHz FSB, and sometimes, these 66MHz FSB coming from OEMs come shipped with a cheaper older mobo that doesn't support the 100 or more FSB.

A good place to find some deals on K6-2 processors are these forums. From time to time, you'll see someone post a k6-2 offer with a good price, say about 20-30 bux or less for a 500+ MHz chip. Just be sure to shop around, and not jump on the first deal you see, cuz it may not be the best one.

OC-Master -- sorry to say this, but a Duron mops the floor with a K6-3+ in almost everything, because of the advanced system bus, the enhancements in the K7 architecture over the K6's, etc.

UPDATE : linkages to support my statements : (I'm sorry to link to such a disgusting site :D) http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/99q1/990223/index-04.html this is a K6-3 benchmark, compared to a K6-2, Celeron, Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 (Katmai).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q2/000619/duron-08.html Sorry, couldn,t find a direct comparasion between a K6-3 and a Duron :(


Those benchmarks reflect the performance of the K6-2 and K6-3 processors, not the K6-3+ processor. the K6-3+ processor has only one disadvantage over first generation Durons, which is the FSB. The K6-3+ actually has more memory to play with, hence its got 256KB of L2 cache and a L3 cache which i believe is 512KB on the P5A mobo. So actually, the K6-3+ should be noticeably faster than a Duron 600.

But just make sure you got the K6-3+ clocked at 600MHz to make things fair ;)


OC-Master
 
OC-Master said:



Those benchmarks reflect the performance of the K6-2 and K6-3 processors, not the K6-3+ processor. the K6-3+ processor has only one disadvantage over first generation Durons, which is the FSB. The K6-3+ actually has more memory to play with, hence its got 256KB of L2 cache and a L3 cache which i believe is 512KB on the P5A mobo. So actually, the K6-3+ should be noticeably faster than a Duron 600.

But just make sure you got the K6-3+ clocked at 600MHz to make things fair ;)


OC-Master

I don't think there's such a difference between the K6-3 and the K6-3+ as you might think : the only noticeable one is the die shrink from .25micron manufacturing process to .18micron, which at the same time reduced the power consumption and the heat generated.

Depending on the mobo you got, the size of the L2 (for K6-2) or L3 (for K6-2+, K6-3 and K6-3+) cache can go from 512KB up to 2MB. BUT, that cache isn't much faster than the system RAM, as it runs at the FSB speed, which clocks it at 100MHz for a normal 500MHz K6-3(+). Anyways, true, in total, the K6-3/3+ has more cache than a Duron (288KB for the K6-3/3+, compared to 192KB for the Duron), but the enhancements to the core of the Athlon and Duron processors themselves (more powerful FPU, more IPCs, etc.) makes them more powerful than the K6-X series. Also, concerning the difference in front-side bus you stated, it's halfway true : they both run at the same front-side bus (100MHz), but the duron uses a DDR bus, compared to the K6-X, which still uses a SDR-only bus.

But anyways, the performance between a K6-3/3+ (which is about equal) should be comparable to that of a Duron. In some disciplines the Duron will win hands down, in others, the K6-3 might surpass. :)
 
Man thanks for all the help on this one, I pulled the computer apart last night. The K6 (333mhz) chip is running at 5.0x66mhz, The motherboard goes up to 5.5 multiplier and the frontside bus is missing the jumpers pins, but the mobo says 50mhz - 83mhz. Does anyone think I can solder the jumper pins in to get the higher fsb? I see nothing in the cmos to help with the fsb?
I also have volt from 2.0 - 3.5, currently at 2.2volts. I will look at the mobo better tonight to get the model number off of it. But I thing I might be able to help her out, at least at first glance.
 
These guys....
http://www.redhill.net.au/ig.html
Say somewhere on site that they thought that the last K6-3 systems felt faster to use than early athlons. (DDR didn't come along for a little while remember)

Also core shrinks did help the 2+ and 3+, but it was not by a huge amount, I think Toms has a benchmark up showing a couple of percent or so. Core shrinks usually help any CPU by a percent or two.

I didn't think the pluses were as much a test for athlon on 18 micron though as a stopgap until they got the mobile athlons ready. I seem to recall that they came out after the announcement of socket A, before slots were done with.

Anyway, from all I've heard, anything that will take a CTX cored K6-2 will take a plus, it just might not get the best performance at boot if the BIOS support is not there, and display something strange for speed and type, but you can fix that, there are 3 or 4 utilities around that reset the registers for better performance.

regards,

Road Warrior
 
if you use the board 2x multi on a k6-2 it will read it as 6x
so you could get up to 400 without stressing the motherboard.

if you do manage to up the fsb 75mhz will get you 450. 83 would be 500 but the 83mhz fsb is hard to hit reliably becase some hard drives and many pci cards can't handle it.
 
Via chipset boards, the VP2, VP3 etc, usually have a jumper setting to run the PCI at 33Mhz while the FSB is at 83Mhz. May or may not be implemented on that board.

It may be that that 333 is implemented either as 3.5x95 or 5x66, they were both "standard" implementations. If it's at 5x66 obviously your worries might be directed towards whether the bus speed can go any higher, also the BF2 clock multiplier pin may be locked on, so that you can only get multipliers from 4 to 5.5, could happen on an OEM board, usually it's the other way round, which is why the 2x=6x trick is so useful.

If you're running at 3.5x95 then you need to wonder if the BF2 jumper is implemented for access to 4x-5.5x multipliers, because using the 2x=6x trick would give you 570Mhz on a 95Mhz bus and you might not necessarily get a CPU that overclocks that well, would be bad luck, but could happen. Also if this is 95Mhz on a SiS chipset board the board might not necessarily have a 100Mhz setting, there were some boards/chipsets around that purported to be 100Mhz but were not, they lied about the CPU speed when set to 100 and actually ran at 95 or 97 Mhz (because 100Mhz was unstable)

Multipliers.
1.5=3.5 for MMX and better BF2 EN =5.5x
2.0=6.0 for CXT core, BF2 EN = 4x
2.5 BF2 EN = 4.5x
3.0 BF2 EN = 5x
 
Oops missed your post above. So you've got 66 and there are settings for up to 83 but there jumpers aren't there.

Look carefully at the pads, you may see there are links hardwiring the 66Mhz speed. They may also look like surface mount resistors with 000 printed on top of them. Now, if you've got the settings for 83, make sure you break any links there you don't need (maybe just breaking links will do it) and the safest way to reconnect would be to use the defogger repair paint as used for unlocking XPs, saves cooking the board by accident. but if you're really confident with your soldering skills you can do that too.

Shouldn't be too much trouble to scratch off the paint and reapply if it turns out 83Mhz is not stable.

So try setting the multiplier to 4x and the bus to 83Mhz, should give you 333 still but with a faster bus, and test that setting for signs of video corruption, harddisk errors, sound distortion etc, and if it's good then you know that you should be able to hit 500Mhz with a new CPU. However, I wouldn't bother trying to overclock the 333 that's in there, they really are pretty dire at overclocking. If you get problems, then try 75Mhz.

If you only get 75, then you'll only be good for 450Mhz, in which case the $19 400 at compgeeks should do you, replace the HP cooler though, it's probably not over generously specified.
If you can't run stable on anything but 66, well, tough luck, not worth buying a 400 probably, so beg a used socket A cooler off someone and bang the chip up to 5.5x multi for 366, if you're lucky the chip might be a CXT core and do 6x multiplier, and actually overclock to 400, but in my experience it's very rare even for the CXT cores to get very far when they're 333s.

I'd be fairly sure that 450 will be achievable, and that's around a 35% speed boost, and tips the machine over the "minimum 400Mhz" spec hump comfortably. Meaning software DVD players have a hope in hell of working, and some recent games might play in really low res, bargain bin ones in a reasonable res.

To stabilise the 333 at 366 or the 400 at 450 you might need to tweak the voltage to 2.4 which isn't a major amount, though any more than that will probably not be worth much in the way of stability and will buy you real heat problems. You'll see in the database on the front page some people running silly voltages, but those are peltier cooled usually.

regards,

Road Warrior
 
demon-eater, you are wrong about the on-die L2 cache for the K6-2 as they have none. The only K6 series that have on-die L2 cache is the K6-3, which has 256k of on-die L2, and the 2 mobile procs that AMD came out with towards the end of development of the K6-x series. Those are the K6-3+, with 256k of on-die L2 and the K6-2+, which has 128k of on-die L2. That is probably what messed you up about the L2 cache on K6-2. Both the K6-3+ and K6-2+ were the only K6-x series of procs to be built on the .18 micron process; they were used by AMD to proof the process for Athlon. BTW, the K6-2+ and K6-3+ were built for mobile use and are picky on what mobo they will run in, but if your board supports them they give good performance. I found that they are roughly comparable to the performance of a P3 of roughly the same speed and might be slightly faster than a Celeron of the same speed in a lot of apps.


DUDE All i did was paste that from a web page i did a search on google!!! I don't know much about K6's that why i pasted what i found.. where did you get your information???
 
Just thought I'd throw a WCPUID screenie in, no L2 cache here....

That webpage must have been wrong, tell us where it is so we can all flame him :D
pic follows, couldn't get it any smaller and still read it....
 

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