VOGONS


First post, by Kahenraz

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I have a Socket 7 motherboard with an AMD K6 233mhz which is label says should run at 3.2/3.3v. The silkscreen on the motherboard is difficult to read as to which option the jumper is set to but I am reading about 2.8v on the linear regulator.

I'm having trouble understanding whether VR or VRE should be chosen based on the voltage of the CPU. I'm also not finding any reference as to why the output is 2.8v. Is the jumper set wrong?

Another thing that I'm curious about is whether supplying 2.8v instead of 3.3v makes the CPU run cooler by undervoting it.

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Last edited by Kahenraz on 2021-08-13, 00:06. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 2, by mkarcher

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You have the old version of the K6 233. AMD used a design that worked well up to 200MHz at the usual 2.8V for split-voltage CPUs. To counter Intel's Pentium MMX 233, AMD selected K6 processors that ran stable at 233MHz if overvolted to 3.2V.

Your board might auto-detect that a split-voltage CPU is installed. Early socket-7 boards only supported 2.8V, or both 2.7 and 2.8V core voltage, but not 3.2V (for your processor) or 2.2V (used by the newer editions of the K6 and K6-3).

You have two choices: Either you find a way to force the board into single-voltage mode even though a split-voltage processor is installed (probably requires a bodge), make sure you are not using the VRE setting (3.45V), but the VR setting (3.3V), and overvolt even higher (3.3 instead 3.2), or you lower the multiplier from 3.5 to 3.0, and run the processor at 200 MHz. Most likely it will work without problems with 2.8V at that clock, and of course it runs a lot cooler at 200/2.8 than at 233/3.2. I don't expect 233/2.8 to work.