That looks great! I actually shipped a 300PL out to PA yesterday. 🤣

Great PC! What's that giant soundcard?

Good job on replacing the caps...

Any reason you used Rubycon RX series for the 10V 1500uF Canicon? I believe those are rated for automotive use (125C instead of the standard 105C), but have otherwise unimpressive specs...

RacoonRider wrote:

Great PC! What's that giant soundcard?

That would be an IBM Music Feature card. It's one of the first sound cards to appear for the PC, but it was pretty expensive and was competing against stuff like the AdLib and LAPC-I.

The caps were chosen solely based on what I had in my capacitors box. Ideally it would have been better to get one that fit flush against the PCB instead of having to be angled like that; but I need to use up a lot of my spare caps anyways.

There are actually faster K6-III (native) adapters which would give me an even better performance boost. I'll be keeping an eye out for one of those. It's rather surprising that these socket 7 upgrades aren't very popular or widely discussed; despite the popularity of socket 7 systems in general.

That's because everyone likes their Super7 boards. (I do not).

raymangold wrote:

There are actually faster K6-III (native) adapters which would give me an even better performance boost. I'll be keeping an eye out for one of those. It's rather surprising that these socket 7 upgrades aren't very popular or widely discussed; despite the popularity of socket 7 systems in general.

The K6+ chips have an obvious advantage of being able to change its multiplier via software, and have much lower voltage requirements. A K6-III+ ATZ can run at 400MHz at 1.6V, which makes them capable of running passive. They can run at higher voltages, but obviously Super7 is preferred because of BIOS support and some boards can even supply 1.6V. (i actually only know one)

I wasn't aware of these socket upgrades.

If you do upgrade to the K6-3 I wouldn't run it passive and keep a close eye on the VR.

My favourite part about the K6+ chips is that it gets around the only real limitations of the VX and TX chipsets: 64mb caching limit. The K6+ will cache as much memory as your motherboard can handle. I my opinion 100MHz FSB and AGP don't add much value to the socket7 platform.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

That's because everyone likes their Super7 boards. (I do not). My favourite part about the K6+ chips is that it gets around the only real limitations of the VX and TX chipsets: 64mb caching limit. The K6+ will cache as much memory as your motherboard can handle. I my opinion 100MHz FSB and AGP don't add much value to the socket7 platform.

I adore that Socket 7 board in that old IBM. It just... has a certain 'aura' to it that I don't get from other computers. Changing the mobo to something newer would change the experience; it goes through a very specific boot sequence which I've become accustomed to, along with the super-intelligent BIOS: the computer was actually sending beeps and POST logs for "keyboard error". While the keyboard was working with the computer, it was able to detect a change in capacitance: some of the 1986 capacitors in that old Model M you see hooked up to the machine hit their age limit. After replacing the caps in the keyboard the BIOS was then satisifed with what it was reading from the PS/2 port. Quick note: IBM implementations of PS/2 are often more robust and complex than clone implementations... which often don't allow you to dynamically swap mice or keyboards. Also it has the very first implementation of 'soft power', which means you can tap the power button and it'll hard crash so you don't have to hold it down; I love that. If I want to crash my computer I don't want to sit and hold the power button for a minute (the only caveat being is if the system is REALLY frozen you will have to hold the power button down, but that's rare). I could go on and on as to why that computer being regular socket 7 and the age it was released in has features and functions that would be eradicated if I were to upgrade to anything else.

Having CPU upgrade modules is also *very* fun to experiment with. Part of the fun (at least for me) regarding retro computing is the actual hardware to play with. It was awesome playing with the DIP switch and soldering better caps on the VRM of the upgrade.

Onto the memory-- yes! The K6-3 (or lower voltage K6-2+es) can bypass the shoddy intel cache limit. Which is going to be VERY cool for this system if I ever get around to doing that: because that means I'll have 386 MB of fully cached EDO DIMM memory (the controller supports 512 MB but there are only three physical sockets unforunately). Very few Pentium 1 systems can actually go past 128 MB of memory. On that note, even most (all?) super socket 7 mobos can't hit 384 MB and beyond. Aaaaaand most people will say you're nuts if your machine has fully cached 384 MB of EDO memory, let alone in the DIMM form factor.
I know I've repeated that like a dying record but EDO DIMM memory is very cool.

I do have a stash of 128 MB EDO DIMMs, saving them until the little 'puter has a better CPU to handle them. Going *320* MB over your 64 MB cache limit causes a HUUUUGE performance pentalty; I discovered it gets incrementally worse the more memory you have... that means I've experienced a 233 Mhz Pentium 1 operating more slowly than what most people have encountered. To give you an idea, it was so slow that rollercoaster tycoon 1 had a horrible FPS on the main menu screens and would pause every odd second. Going back to 64 MB of RAM and it resumed operating at 60 fps and no cycle pauses or whatever that's called.

PS: Intel has been all over the map with their lacklustre memory controllers and continues to this day. Why Intel released chipsets for a freaking SOCKET 4 Pentium 1 to be able to hit 256 MB of RAM fully cached, and then retrogade their Socket 7 memory controllers down to barely supporting 64 MB is a total scam. I like Intel... but their greed and artificial RAM caps are ridiculous.

Yeah, you had to go HX if you wanted to use a lot of memory. Most HX motherboards should support 512MB, but still most TX boards and some VX boards will do 256.

Is the performance difference btw pentium MMX 233 and the K6-3 so huge?
I actually wanted to change to a K6-III+ since some new games will not run as smooth as I wanted (Star Wars Racer almost run well on low details, Coolin McRae Rally,...)
But I'm afraid too that I may lose some kind of dos compatibility .
But still, for now it's quite a good machine (38fps on quake 2 demo1 with sound), the only evil part is when I end over check disk on windows 98, hell, it takes like 5 minutes to finish it ;--;

ibm5155 wrote:

Is the performance difference btw pentium MMX 233 and the K6-3 so huge? I actually wanted to change to a K6-III+ since some new […]
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Is the performance difference btw pentium MMX 233 and the K6-3 so huge?
I actually wanted to change to a K6-III+ since some new games will not run as smooth as I wanted (Star Wars Racer almost run well on low details, Coolin McRae Rally,...)
But I'm afraid too that I may lose some kind of dos compatibility .
But still, for now it's quite a good machine (38fps on quake 2 demo1 with sound), the only evil part is when I end over check disk on windows 98, hell, it takes like 5 minutes to finish it ;--;

Switching to a 400 Mhz K6-2 will give you at least a good 35% increase in performance in what I was able to see after comparing games. I'm not sure how much better a K6-3 will be-- the *primary* motive of switching to a K6-3 is to take advantage of the cache ability to expand the memory.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "losing DOS compatibility". Games that would kack out from a faster K6-3 would kack out on a 233 pentium. Unfortunately a single system can't play all games (of course), but socket 7 does have a particular 'range', and a CPU upgrade will expand what it is capable of.

35% on k6-2 😮 that's already good, with a 1mb external l2 cache this will be op.
I think I'll let the older games for the c64...
Well, some older games that kack on my pentium mmx can be fixed disabling l1 and l2 cache, Like test drive 3 here is almost playable 😁