PIII or PII-450 in my eyes is kind of the definitive CPU for that platform. Sure, they made faster ones, but I think these were the most popular.
"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
V'Ger XT|Upgraded AT|Ultimate 386|Super VL/EISA 486|SMP VL/EISA Pentium
wrote:wrote:Whatever you finally decide upon, you'll probably be wanting more in the future.
I understand why you'd say that, but in this case, I won't. Once I transfer the 4-track analog masters and remix them, this unit will probably go back into the closet it came from...
lol, all my cases are stored in the closet, but that doesn't stop the belly from growing.
Plan your life wisely, you'll be dead before you know it.
wrote:The K6-2+ 450 has about the 3D accelerated gaming score (Quake 2) of a PII-300. Whatever you finally decide upon, you'll probably be wanting more in the future. I recommend building, both, a socket 7 and slot 1 system, and eventually, any other platform you have interest in. The largest obstacle for me is usually the case.
Funny. For me, it's usually the space.
All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder
wrote:I wasn't aware that BIOSes set the vreg based on stepping codes.
Just to clarify, I don't think the BIOS has any involvement in this function.
The VID is a binary sequence of high/low voltage levels on a few pins (5 in this case) from the CPU. The CPU package is hardwired to set each of those pins to either a high or low state, forming the VID.
Those 5 signals are routed to the voltage regulator IC, which then outputs the corresponding voltage to power the Vcore rail. This should work even with no BIOS present.
BIOS support comes into play for setting up the software side of things like initializing registers or whatever (not sure exactly what it needs to do).
I don't know how the voltage regulation works on boards that support tweaking the voltage though. In those cases, I guess the BIOS is modifying a reference voltage somewhere to trick the regulator.
wrote:I'm thinking worse-case PCI use here will be while recording four channels of audio at once from two PCI soundcards with SPDIF inputs, and spooling it out to a wide SCSI hard drive through a 2940UW.
Hope you have a way to synchronize those word clocks. 😀
wrote:Hope you have a way to synchronize those word clocks. 😀
One problem at a time... 😀
Compared to the sound degradation of the LM741-based mixer I originally used, such issues are trivial!
Why a K6-2+ instead of a K6-3+? A K6-2+ is just a K6-3+ with half the cache, and they should not be too far off, price-wise. I got mine for about 10 USD not too long ago to upgrade my Cobalt Qube 3 Pro...
wrote:Why a K6-2+ instead of a K6-3+?
Because that's what I have.
wrote:There is one BIOS dated february 2000 available on Driverguide (see below) oooooooooooooooooooo Vectra VE 6/xxx Series 8 HT.01.0 […]
There is one BIOS dated february 2000 available on Driverguide (see below)
oooooooooooooooooooo
Vectra VE 6/xxx Series 8
HT.01.08 Bios
February 4th 2000https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php … Pmtiv69GCIYreVj
I just checked, and that's the BIOS that is installed in this board.
And more good news - the Coppermine 667 in a slocket set to 1.8V boots, ID's as "Unknown" running at 500MHz, and works fine.
EDIT - it benchmarks very slow, though, so something is amiss.
EDIT 2 - I see why now. Since it doesn't recognize the cpu, it disables the 256k cache. Or doesn't enable it. There's nothing inthe BIOS settings to change that.
So Coppermine is not compatible with this board.
Why, AMD of course!
Intel is so mainstream. K6-2+ is kind of niche. Also it's very overclock-able.
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wrote:And more good news - the Coppermine 667 in a slocket set to 1.8V boots, ID's as "Unknown" running at 500MHz, and works fine. EDI […]
And more good news - the Coppermine 667 in a slocket set to 1.8V boots, ID's as "Unknown" running at 500MHz, and works fine.
EDIT - it benchmarks very slow, though, so something is amiss.
EDIT 2 - I see why now. Since it doesn't recognize the cpu, it disables the 256k cache. Or doesn't enable it. There's nothing inthe BIOS settings to change that.So Coppermine is not compatible with this board.
At least it's letting you boot. I wonder if there's a utility that can initialize the CPU properly. Anybody know?
Good idea. This thread says the SetMul utility will do it:
SetMul - Multiplier control for VIA C3 / AMD K6+7+8 Mobile / Cyrix 5x86
I'll try it tonight.
I used the SetMul commands to enable L1 and L2 caches and it made no difference. Checkit still reports the same very slow performance.
