P5A is really nice for those K6 systems. Had great fun with a similar setup.

The only not so good thing seems that pentium class cooler... Perhaps something more adequate shoud be installed.

That cooler actually works OK on a K6-2 as long as you're not trying to do any huge overclocks... though I mainly sent it because it had the least annoying fan of all my random coolers. 🤣

Oh, and you probably don't want 256MB RAM in that thing, that ALi chipset can only cache 128MB.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

That cooler actually works OK on a K6-2 as long as you're not trying to do any huge overclocks... though I mainly sent it because it had the least annoying fan of all my random coolers. 🤣

I know P5A is limited because it has a few capacitors around cpu socket, but i find these coolers to lack performance (at least with the k6-2 550MHz).

I remember EPOX having HUGE space around cpu socket, and believe me that with a nice athlon cooler, temps were great!

I really don't like the idea of overclocking and prefer to go with what the factory says the part's capable of so I'm sure the cooler will be fine. As for the memory, I'm glad to know that before I got started. I'll go ahead and pull some chips out; 128mb is still more than Windows 98 needs anyways. Besides, if the cooler isn't enough and the cpu somehow burns out, it's not like I don't have enough chips laying around to replace it.

I know P5A is limited because it has a few capacitors around cpu socket, but i find these coolers to lack performance (at least with the k6-2 550MHz).

Maybe, but I had that particular cooler on a K6-2 400 (maybe even the same chip I sent) that ran pretty much 24/7 for years, as a network router. The thing did crash occasionally, but I think that was due more to the flaky PCChips board than any heat problem. 🤣

Alphakilo470 wrote:

Besides, if the cooler isn't enough and the cpu somehow burns out, it's not like I don't have enough chips laying around to replace it.

These cpus can handle a great amount of "pain". I have seen many dead fans on k6-2 and they always survived. Machine kept crashing, that's also true. 😀

Overclocking is another league. These chips tolerate core voltages very good, usually going all the way up to 2.5V, even more. But at 2.8V (pentium MMX voltage) it's a dead cpu.

My point is that if we can get better cooling, we should go for it.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Oh, and you probably don't want 256MB RAM in that thing, that ALi chipset can only cache 128MB.

Please look at this post:

question on socket7 boards onboard cache

Then look at 5u3's 4th post on that page. At the very end of this 4th post, 5u3 has tested a P5A with 1MB of cache, and it cached all 768MB of RAM.

@sprcorreia

I hope they can. I have only had two AMD K6 CPUs in the past and the first one, despite having a large heatsink, fried itself dead minutes after the fan quit spinning. Then again, that one was a 450mhz model so maybe it ran hotter. I replaced it with a 300mhz model; I'm not quite sure what happened to that chip.

Then look at 5u3's 4th post on that page. At the very end of this 4th post, 5u3 has tested a P5A with 1MB of cache, and it cached all 768MB of RAM.

That's all well and fine, but quite irrelevant... the board in question has 512K cache, and as stated in the same thread you linked, with 512K, the chipset can only cache 128MB.

Easy solution: K6-2+ or K6-3+ with on die L2 Cache!

When I have it running I'll see how it runs with 256mb and 128mb. In my experience, caching the memory has more effect on paper and in a sales pitch than in actual use. I'll be sure to run some benchmarks to see as well as to entertain everyone.

Also, in an unrelated note, in the same batch of parts Old Thrashbarg sent me that included the motherboard featured here, I got a Creative "Goldfinch" card which I've read plenty of negative comments on. I'll have to try getting that thing to work. Considering it's basically just an EMU8000 chip and two simm sockets on an ISA card (only significant difference between an SB16 and AWE32 were just that), I don't see what could be so bad about the card.

I appreciate that the following is common knowledge on this forum, but I still wanted to test this myself. I am testing a Gigabyte GA-5AX SS7 mobo, revision 4.1. It came with a couple of CPUs. A K6-2, and a K6-3. The K6-3 is a 400MHz chip.

I ran ctcm7.exe (CTCM17A) on the K6-2 chip first. It told me that the mobo's 192Mb of RAM could not be fully cached. I then removed this chip, and replaced it with the K6-3. ctcm7.exe did not report this cache problem. The first part of ctcm7's output can be found below as an attachment. Of course, the reason is that this chip has onboard cache.

Regarding the Speedsys screenshot. I guess the three graphic "steps" which can be seen in the bottom right area represent the L1, L2, and L3 caches. I also guess that L3 cache works normally, and is not affected in anyway by any bug in the ALi chipset.

Edit: I just want to confirm that the K6-III chip is not a + chip. At least, I'm 99% certain it isn't. But I just remembered something. Don't you need a + chip, in order to avoid the cache bug? I'm a bit confused now! Begin Edit 2: I just double-checked the K6-3 chip. It does not have a + symbol after the K6-III writing on the CPU. End Edit 2.

retro games 100 wrote:

Regarding the Speedsys screenshot. I guess the three graphic "steps" which can be seen in the bottom right area represent the L1, L2, and L3 caches. I also guess that L3 cache works normally, and is not affected in anyway by any bug in the ALi chipset.

First guess is right, but I'm not so sure on the second one. The onboard cache is bound to have the same limitations (e.g.: caches only up to 128 MB), regardless of the CPU.
If your K6 has on-chip cache, these become rather irrelevant because the internal cache is so much faster. So it doesn't matter if your L3 cache is slightly broken.

These K6 models can be used to circumvent typical (Super-)Socket 7 onboard cache limitations.

Thanks a lot for the info. I see from that Wikipedia page, and also looking at the Speedsys result above, that my K6-3 CPU is a Sharptooth model, and that it has 256 KiB of fullspeed (onboard) L2 cache.

retro games 100 wrote:

Don't you need a + chip, in order to avoid the cache bug?

Nope 😉

The ones that circumvent the cache limit thingy are the K6-III, K6-2+ and K6-III+. All 3 of these will do 😉

Any of the other ones (Intel, Cyrix and the little obscure bunch) will not help in this regard.