MVP4 had Trident Blade 3D IGP and Sis 540 had Sis 300 and this one should be faster in 3D games. Meanwhile aladdin7 IGP is a bit mysterious, it support dual channel SDR and T&L but I'm not sure if such motherboards exist, although a few have been announced.

http://www.k6plus.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=1782
The Ali Aladdin 7 was originally supposed to support DDR and 64mb onboard graphics, I think it was only on the market a few months, looked for one for years and never could find a board with it, by all accounts the best super 7 board with 133mhz FSB

Back in the day I remember tons of k6-2 / 3 -/+ laptop options on the market.

Why they seemed to instantly disappear even on the used market by 2003 I don’t know.

A lot of different models were offered even from bigger companies like compaq, maybe they all went to gov/school and got scrapped?
Maybe unreliable? Maybe very few produced even though many models offered?

Not sure but they are hard to find,
back in the day (2000+) I would have liked one but even as a value option they were too expensive for me.

It reminds me if the labs full of 180mhz MediaGX Compaq systems my school setup during high school
back then the school being 3 years behind on the OS with a internet lab was amazing, the high end stuff back then was still 486s and the majority of normal school systems were a mix of Apple IIs , Mac Plus and LC, plus the random assortment of IBM 286 & 386sx.
Despite seeing MediaGX systems in almost every school I never saw those machines make it to the used market.

One last comment is that a laptop with a discreet video chip and memory would be better but by the time k6+ was around that wasn’t a thing as the systems were downstream in the value segment.
sis540 on paper was great but for me at least had reliablity issues

Even by 2005 there weren't many around. Mostly I think it was 2nd and 3rd tier manufacturers. Also there's a raft of problems around that time that made survival of laptops of that era less likely in general. LCD supplies were getting tight, as now they had begun to be in demand for the early standalone LCD monitors, consumers demanded higher speed panels to actually see video on them. So the high end models from the top tier manufacturers got the fast panels, lower down the market they got stuck with the blurry stuff that debuted on 486 class. Backlights, in order to be bright enough and low power enough were a bit overdriven, resulting in ~3 year lifetimes. Everyone seemed to forget how to make hinges, hinge failure seemed to be endemic around that time. I think this was from trying to take the market from machined parts for $5000 machines to injection moulded parts for sub $2000 machines. Then also the NiMh to LIon battery transition had casualties, with LIon machines having a nasty tendency to be completely dead when the battery failed, no running off the power adapter either... then the replacement batts at that time were still significantly expensive $300 plus. And finally the one everyone knows about, the capacitor plague.

So, a whole gauntlet of issues a machine of that era could have got junked for within 2-5 years of sale, blurry screen, black screen, broken hinge, dead from batt failure, dead from cap failure. ... and K6-x laptops were a smaller percentage of the market anyway, by less reputable manufacturers in the main. So we don't really see them much nowadays.

I wonder how tough it would be to find a “better” socket 7 laptop from before the great sucking and upgrade it to a k6-2+?

The MMX-266 laptops could be ordered in (for the time) high end trims with competent 2d video (no idea if any had 3D) bios would be an issue not sure what 2.5v io would do either but might be an easier path forward.

I had a K6-2 laptop that I put a K6-III+ 450 in back in the day and promptly modded the heatsink for way better contact and overclocked it to 550Mhz.

The graphics were horrible and the laptop had previous issues with being flakey. Eventually I pulled the CPU and I think probably saved a few bits from the laptop and threw the rest away.

Beware that So7 laptops were very low-end by the time the K6-3+ came along. That means they were inevitably cheap models with low build quality. That won't help the chances of finding one.

I recall Packard Bell had a K6-2+ laptop around 2000/2001 when I worked at their helpdesk. It was awful, even in-warranty the calls started about hinges falling apart. Iirc it was from Mitac like all PB systems at the time, just a cheaper ODM line.

My first ever laptop was a Toshiba Satellite (I forget what model) that came with a K6-2 500 IIRC. I bought it used in 2003, and I upgraded it to a K6-2+ 550. It worked well enough (it was a bit of a dog with WinXP, much better with Win98), but unfortunately the BIOS didn't recognize it as a + CPU, so not all of the features were used. I actually contacted Jan back then, but it seems that laptop BIOS editing is much more difficult than it is for desktops, so it was stuck as it was. I eventually gave it to some friends and they used it for years until one of their kids managed to destroy the PCMCIA slot. I eventually took it in to an ewaste place without bothering to diassemble it and remove the CPU.

I stumbled across this antique thread where I and another person were trying to find a way to get BIOS support for it. Internet archaeology. https://www.wimsbios.com/forum/cpu-isn-recogn … lite-t6296.html

Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-12-10, 20:11:

My first ever laptop was a Toshiba Satellite (I forget what model) that came with a K6-2 500 IIRC. I bought it used in 2003, and I upgraded it to a K6-2+ 550. It worked well enough (it was a bit of a dog with WinXP, much better with Win98), but unfortunately the BIOS didn't recognize it as a + CPU, so not all of the features were used. I actually contacted Jan back then, but it seems that laptop BIOS editing is much more difficult than it is for desktops, so it was stuck as it was. I eventually gave it to some friends and they used it for years until one of their kids managed to destroy the PCMCIA slot. I eventually took it in to an ewaste place without bothering to diassemble it and remove the CPU.

I stumbled across this antique thread where I and another person were trying to find a way to get BIOS support for it. Internet archaeology. https://www.wimsbios.com/forum/cpu-isn-recogn … lite-t6296.html

And I had forgotten about this thread at Hardforum. https://hardforum.com/threads/check-out-my-ha … upgrade.845058/

🤣, Sean478: