Reply 80 of 166, by cyclone3d
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- l33t++
wrote:The reason the K6-2 was interesting is that it was cheaper and used cheaper motherboards. It was never faster than any contemporary Intel design - it was never really even in striking distance. The K6-III+ was, kinda, but by the time it came out, the P2/400 or P2/450 ran rings around it. It could trade blows with a P2/333, at least. AMD didn't fight Intel on level terrain until the Athlon came out (and then it was slightly faster per clock as well as equally clocked). K6 vs P2 was a more unequal fight than Bulldozer vs Haswell. (At least Bulldozer rigs are fast enough for current-at-the-time games; the same could not be consistently said of the K6.)
I do remember that the cost delta between a K6 machine and a P2/P3 was quite large. The Celeron, not quite so much, but really, you had to overclock them to do well, and if you didn't know your onions, overclocking seemed like black magic.
When I was purchasing K6-2 CPUs, my work computer had a Pentium II 266 that I overclocked to 300 to try to make it more useable.
I was also overclocking K6-2 CPUs at the time. Fastest I ever ran was a K6-2 550 @ 660 on an ASUS P5A.
The ALI Aladdin V chipset was quite a bit faster than then Via chipsets.
As for my "new" cpu progression....
1991 - 386 SX-25 the 486 was already out, but this was the first computer my family had.
Next new CPU I bought new was an AMD 5x86-133. Not sure what year, Pentiums were already out.
K6
K6-2 (multiple)
Slot-A Athlons. Those were the bomb-diggity. Buy a 500Mhz, and crack it open to find a 650Mhz core. The faster ones usually also had a faster than labeled core.
Socket A Athlons.
Athlon XP
And then the Athlon XP period hit and I was on those for quite a while.
Athlon 64 and Opteron
After that phase, I bought an Athlon 64 3700+ and then on to an Opteron 175 which I de-lidded to drop the load temp by about 20c.
Q6600
Then it was all over for AMD when the Core2 stuff came out because of Intel's nasty dealings to hurt AMD's marketshare. My next new rig will most likely be AMD based
as they have finally pulled their collective heads out of their rears and built something worth buying. I love to see Intel sweat 😁
i7-920 then to a Xeon after the 920 died a sudden death after a few years.
i7-4930k