The K6-III+ 550ACR is really a rare find, congrats! 😃

Still for WinXP and games of 2000-2002 it is pretty slow so I feel there's no good recommendation.
The best Super7 boards in my opinion are the Asus P5A, Epox MVP3G5 and Gigabyte GA-5AX Rev 5.2. The last K6XV3+/66 revision is also good, especially in the 1MB cache variant.

DraxDomax wrote on 2021-06-23, 13:02:

1. Play games of 2000-2002

A K6-3+ is too slow to comfortably play games from that time period.

Great CPU though, just not for that use case.

Do you reckon it'll do better on an WindowsME?
Or even 98SE?
I am probably subliminally hoping you'd say I need to build ANOTHER system for Windows XP 😉

Personally, I would use a K6-3+ to run DOS and Win9x games up to the year 2000. That CPU has excellent slowdown capabilities which allow it to play a wide range of games at their intended speeds.

For early WinXP gaming, go with an AthlonXP or an Athlon64.

It's crazy how fast things were changing in the late 90's.
It's like each year has a system that best works for the games released in it... I personally feel that the "flagship" system for every 2 years is fundamentally different... From 486 to AT-PCI-MMX... To ATX-AGP-LateK6 and then PII/PII.
Really feels like things started to cool off with dual cores...

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-06-23, 13:29:

Personally, I would use a K6-3+ to run DOS and Win9x games up to the year 2000. That CPU has excellent slowdown capabilities which allow it to play a wide range of games at their intended speeds.

Indeed, the principal benefit of Super Socket 7 seems to be its slowdown capabilities. I have the impression AGP support tends to be kind of lacking.

DraxDomax wrote on 2021-06-23, 13:02:

I seem to have stumbled upon a K6-III+ 550ACR :) and looking to build a system around it. 8><CUT In terms of speed, I read here […]
Show full quote

I seem to have stumbled upon a K6-III+ 550ACR 😀 and looking to build a system around it.
8><CUT
In terms of speed, I read here that the 133 and 120 FSB speeds are unstable with the K6-III+?
So, I guess I'll be setting it up for 5.5x100?

This cpu is an 'extended' version and will run at 6x100 when jumpered for multi 2x.
https://www.amd-k6.com/history/
[The CXT K6-2 processors and beyond also have a multiplier remap of 2.0x = 6.0x so you can use them with a 6.0x multiplier even if your motherboard doesn’t support it.]

But the comments that point out that it is too weak for games from the post 2000 period make sense.
600MHz Pentium III and Athlon were in combination with TNT2 already taking over the scene in summer of 1999.

IMO they were good to the end of 2001, 2002 things really began to get CPU hungry, and that's about when AGP4x and dx8 began to get important, even though there were still games releasing on older DX7 engines. DDR had just arrived also and things got bigger with that increase in bandwidth. XP wasn't really favored over 98SE for gaming for a year or so yet. There was still a lot of trickle down time between release dates of things and when you could buy them, less so in software, more so in hardware, Intel was particularly bad, "releasing" things 6 to 8 months before you could actually get hold of one. AMD went the other way on less major speed bumps and infill models, they'd have them in distribution channels before they officially "existed", i.e. acknowledged on their website or mentioned in even online hardware press. Then aside from that, savvy gamers would be waiting 6 months for price drops on bleeding edge stuff, so if you wanted to sell games, you sold games that would run on systems people actually owned. 800x600 would have been a popular gaming res at the time, shifting to 1024x768 into 2003

Re the P5A vs K6Plus, that's a motherboard chipset revision thing vs an Asus engineering messup.

ALi Aladdin V up to rev E: bugged internal tag RAM for L2 cache. Max 64MB cacheable on the board.
ALi Aladdin V rev G: internal tag working, can cache all RAM.

The P5A up to rev 1.04 used the chipset up to rev E. They work fine with K6Plus (my K6-3+ ATZ is more than happy at 4x133MHz) and not being able to cache RAM over 64MB is hardly an issue when motherboard cache is relegated to L3 status and the 256kB L2 on the CPU can cache everything anyway.

P5A rev 1.05 and higher have the rev G. Can cache all RAM on the motherboard and are some of the fastest boards for K6-2 non-Plus, but due to Asus mistake, K6plus CPUs are unstable. There's a simple fix: K6-2/3+ Success on Asus P5A 1.06 - simple mod - then they are stable.

Max 64MB cacheable on the board.

128Mb.

I second (or third) the Win98/DOS suggestion.

XP is a bit much. Socket 7 is my favorite platform and a K6-3+ is my favorite CPU as well, so great choices, but XP is a little outside of it's capabilities. It will run it but not well.

Voodoo 5 is great card well, maybe a bit of a waste on Socket 7 machine, a Voodoo 3/4 be a better choice but if a 5 is what you have it's still a great card.

Others on here will have better knowledge than I as to what board to chose, but anything that supports the K6-3+ with appropriate voltages and bus speeds should work.

Avoid anything with a SiS530 chipset would be my advice.....

Since that CPU is rare definitely build a rig for it just don't have high hopes for the games you intended to play. If you're lucky your board may accept GeForce 5xxx series (AGP 8x). CPU will likely become a bottleneck before the slow AGP speed. It's worth a try though.