Actually, that board should be able to run the chip at up to 600mhz and theoretically even faster, though I don't know of many chips that would do more than 600. The 475 chip is a 5x95mhz, but since the multipliers are re-mapped, setting it to 2X should get you a 6x multiplier, and the board supports 100mhz+ FSB.

But yes, the K6-III chips weren't particularly popular, so they're a bit difficult to find, and that goes moreso with the better K6-III+. You might wanna consider getting a K6-2+, which is a chip with the smaller manufacturing process and 128KB L2. Won't be quite as good as the 256KB cache of the K6-III, but they're easier to find and will clock higher than the plain K6-III.

Here's one of the K6-2+ chips I have on my eBay watch list, $10 isn't too bad.

Thanks for the K6-2+ recommendation. 😀

I've just noticed the IWill mobo's CPU socket is broken - I can't hook on a heatsink clip. Nevermind. I grabbed a heavy socket A heatsink, and just rested it on top of the installed K6-2 500mhz CPU. Seems to work! It posts OK, and runs Windows 98. I ran speedsys in DOS. I got a score of 573, which is greater than the K6-III 500 benchmark. Eh?!

Anyway, I wanna crank this thing up until it starts smoking! At the moment, I've got the bus speed jumper set to 100, but there aren't any more jumper settings to increase that value. There's a voltage jumper set to 2.2 - I can increase this using jumpers to 2.3, 2.4, etc. There's another voltage jumper, which is set to 3.5 - I can increase this using jumpers to 3.6 or 3.8

Which jumper shall I change first?! BTW, I flashed the BIOS OK. Curiously, the general screen image quality now seems inferior. Strange. (I've noticed this phenomenon before when flashing other boards.)

I had a look inside the BIOS's Chipset features, and found a setting called Clock Frequency. I changed this from "jumper setting" to 115mhz, and rebooted. The BIOS POST screen reported that my K6-2 500 CPU was a 575 speed CPU, but the Windows 98 splash screen was corrupted and it failed to boot. (Problem with the Voodoo3 AGP card perhaps?)

I adjusted the BIOS Clock Frequency value to 110mhz, and the BIOS POST screen said the CPU was now a 550 speed chip. It seems to work. Speedsys gave me a score of 623, surging past the Celeron 500 benchmark value. Shall I do anything with the physical jumpers on the mobo, to see if I can get this CPU to go any faster? It's a pity about the broken CPU heatsink clip - this might interfer with my OC'ing plans.

I hope my Intel MMX 233 CPU arrives tomorrow. I'm looking forward to getting that to run at 300! 😀

The second PC I ever owned was based off the MVP3 chipset and it had a K6-2 400. It ran for a good long time, and then one day the fan in my heatsink burned out. It sat for a lwhile, during which I was using my Dual P-Pro rig until I got a new HSF combo to use with it. The new one was a lot bigger than the previous, and so I decided to to push some extra clocks out of it. My board had a setting for 112mhz bus speed, but since my ram was only PC100 I could never even get it to boot. I was able to get it to boot at 450mhz using the multipliers, but it wasn't very stable. In a foolish move I decided to increase the the multiplier a little more along with the voltage (two steps even if I recall...) and POP!!! Neither the processor or board ever worked again.

I've altered two jumpers so far: core voltage from 2.2 to 2.3, and i/o voltage from 3.5 to 3.6. The BIOS POST screen still says my K6-2 500 is a K6-2 550. I tried to alter the multiplier jumper from 500 to 550, but the mobo didn't POST. I also tried setting the BIOS Clock frequency value higher than 110mhz, but the mobo became very unstable. So, I'll leave it alone - at 550.

I tried the Quake 2 timedemo Demo 2 (800x600), and the fps score was very disappointing: about 37 fps, and that was with the Voodoo3 AGP card considerably OC'd. The following webpage about this IWill mobo with a K6-2 400 confirms the same thing:

http://active-hardware.com/english/reviews/ma … xa100plus-2.htm (Quake 2 benchmarks about 2/3rds the way down)

Edit: However, glQuake 1 (800x600x16) gives 91 fps, which is good.

I'm not surprised that the K6-3 was unpopular since the K6-2 was terrible for use in gaming computers (at least if the motherboard has a VIA chipset anyways).

I also seemed to remember it being bloody expensive at the time. I think it was one of the first chips with the on die L2 cache.

They were popular, but k6-2s were cheaper and were only around for four months before the athlon arrived.

ih8registrations wrote:

They were popular, but k6-2s were cheaper and were only around for four months before the athlon arrived.

Athlon = good. 😀
K6 = bad. 😉

Keep the I/O voltage at 3.3v, its the core that you need to play with. Just be real careful, the socket 7 is the only platform I have had melt down on me. If you pull too much current through the board it will be the end of it.

OK! 😀 Re: K6s, I think I've seen enough! I'll return to this SS7 board when the MMX 233 arrives.

Actually I'm not convinced that K6-3 was popular. It only mattered for a few months. It was significantly more expensive than a K6-2 and price was the primary reason to go AMD. Athlon came out not long afterward.

K6-3's weakest point is gaming. They are pretty good for other apps and definitely faster than a K6-2. The whole system will feel more responsive because the on-die L2 cache is insanely faster than the horrid mobo L2. Unfortunately the faster cache subsystem doesn't help with the pathetic FPU or overall RAM performance so 3D games don't run much better. It's too bad that 3DNow didn't really go anywhere.

Another big advantage to K6-3 over -2 is how the on-die L2 will cache up to 4GB RAM. Socket 7 systems usually have rather low cacheable RAM sizes. 128-256MB is typical, with some only managing 64MB.

The original K6-3 is a rather warm CPU compared to -2. They also understandably don't overclock as well because the cache affects that. The chip to have is definitely K6-3+ although the 2+ is the same thing but with half of the cache disabled (not a huge loss). These CPUs run quite cool if you can operate them at their specced 1.9v or so.

Ferraris are popular, but you don't see everyone driving down the street with one. For socket 7, people bought k6-2s, but pinned for k6-3s, it was the better chip.

Lets all take a moment to honor the glorious Duron. A CPU you just don't see mentioned much anymore, and that is a shame!!! The first <$100 CPU to do 1 GHz rather easily, and make expensive P3s look silly at the same time.

Actually I'm not convinced that K6-3 was popular. It only mattered for a few months. It was significantly more expensive than a K6-2 and price was the primary reason to go AMD. Athlon came out not long afterward.

Exactly. The K6-series always had inferior performance to the Intel offerings of the time, and with SS7, the platform was pretty troublesome too... but a good number of people found that acceptable when the price difference was factored in.

The K6-III changed that, basically killing the price advantage AMD had over Intel's Celeron, and as such, most people building new systems just made the jump to Slot-1. There was also the fact that the K6-III was widely known to be the dead-end for the Socket 7 platform, which was another major strike against it for new system buyers.

So that left the main buyers of K6-IIIs being people upgrading older Socket 7 systems... a pretty limited market indeed.

Edit: Another thing I just thought about... I don't remember any OEMs using the K6-III. I know Compaq and a few others used K6-2s in some of their lower-end desktop systems, and I remember seeing K6-2/3+ chips in some laptops, but it seems like they passed over the regular K6-III. That alone would've put a major dent in the chip's popularity.

I just couldn't resist messing about again! 😀 This is the first time I've OC'd a mobo and CPU before, so I guess it's a learning experience.

I put in an old P166MMX CPU in to the IWill board. It's an old flat brown type of CPU, not the newer "sci-fi looking" metallic one. I set the V Core mobo jumper to 2.9, and left the Multiplier mobo jumper alone at 2.5. I tried changing this jumper a couple of times, but strangely it either didn't affect the BIOS POST report of what the CPU speed was, or it made it slower! Instead, inside the BIOS setup area, I changed the CPU Frequency value to 100.2mhz! The BIOS POSTed OK, and reported that the 166 CPU was a 250 CPU. Inside Win98, I cranked up the Voodoo3 card's core & memory clock value from 166 to 192. Then, I tested glQuake @ 1024x768x16, and got 69.7 fps for the timedemo demo 2 test, which I think is very good.

I quickly switched off the mobo, cos I've just got a heatsink & fan sat on the CPU without it snapped on to it, as the heatsink clip's broken. However, I'd be interested to know if/how I can make it go even faster - just for a laugh!

This webpage looks interesting:

http://www.hattix.co.uk/hardware/index.php?page=cpu.html

It talks about P MMX CPUs, locked and unlocked multipliers, AMD K6s, and lots more.

interesting page there RG100....

retro games 100 wrote:

I'd be interested to know if/how I can make it go even faster - just for a laugh!

You could try to push the FSB higher, with the multiplier being locked I figure that's about the only option. If you hadn't already, switch to PC133, since the clock rate of the RAM is going to be equal to the FSB you set.