The K6-2 is a great chip for running Windows 98SE on. So far looks like you have a good retro setup for mid and late 90s games. I can't vouch for later models but I know the original GeForce as well as the 2MX were mostly VESA compliant and performed well with most DOS games I ran. What brand and model chipset is on the motherboard?

I will let you know tomorrow when I take it apart again. I forgot now, and it's up and running and I'm tired of climbing on the desk with a torch to look inside. Watch this space (I'd like to know myself as well!).

Van

As the K6-2 doesn't come with L2 cache, does your motherboard cache all of the 256MB memory?

I don't know sir how do I check this?

BIOS? or must I have to check the motherboard model and find the specs?

Do any SS7 CPU's have L2 cache?
What's the best SS7 CPU that I can get for games from this era?

What brand hard drive? That's important for the whole 'quiet' part.

Remember, the Voodoo2 is faster in this case because 3dfx hand optimized their drivers to support 3Dnow! extensions. It's even more with their MiniGL wrappers. When I had a TNT2 in a K6 for a while, it did feel comparably awful.

A Geforce2 shouldn't feel tnt2 slow though, should be faster because of the TNL stuff.

K6-III, K6-2+ and K6-III+ have L2 cache. The K6+'s should be relatively easy to find.

Dunno what program to use to check for the cacheable area, but iirc it was ctcm??
Anyway, what you could do is test again with just 128MB installed (provided you're using a Super 7 board which is not using a SiS chipset).

Try as I might I can't find a K6-2+ or a K6-3 CPU on ebay. I am looking on the UK site. Maybe there might be some on the USA one, but I would like the best CPU this board can take. I think a K6-3 450 or higher would suffice.

http://cgi.ebay.com/AMD-K6-III-AMD-K6-3-Repla … =item41585d9a4d

Wow, K6-3+ 570MHz!!! Drool, so cheap too!

I wonder how this benched against a 500MHz Katmai PIII?!?!

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

http://cgi.ebay.com/AMD-K6-III-AMD-K6-3-Repla … =item41585d9a4d

Wow, K6-3+ 570MHz!!! Drool, so cheap too!

I wonder how this benched against a 500MHz Katmai PIII?!?!

Thread with care when it comes to Ebay.
It's actually a K6-2+, and I got my 570's a whole lot cheaper then this

I'd recommend you get a couple of these, much better value for money 😉
-deleted-

Why deleted? This one's cheaper and from the same seller 🤣
http://cgi.ebay.nl/SOKET-7-BOARD-OVERCLOCKING … =item20b99931fa

I've found K6-3 is virtually impossible to find, but fortunately the K6-3+'s are all over the place!
The seller I linked to sells 400Mhz 1.6v ones and are brand new! I can recommend this seller, got a tray of processors from him, all NOS, all worked perfectly, and el cheapos! 😁
These are basically underclocked 550Mhz parts with a lowered standard voltage anyway, they should reach 550Mhz quite easily.

Thanks a million. I will have me one of those!

Katmai will mop the floor with any K6 in 3D games, unfortunately. They are competitive in other apps though.

The most K6 optimized 3D game is probably Quake 2 if you get the AMD written 3Dnow patch. It should beat Katmai there. This may be the best use of 3dnow.

swaaye wrote:

Katmai will mop the floor with any K6 in 3D games, unfortunately. They are competitive in other apps though.

The most K6 optimized 3D game is probably Quake 2 if you get the AMD written 3Dnow patch. It should beat Katmai there. This may be the best use of 3dnow.

true that, but Katmai has one ginourmous disadvantage!....it's is, never was and will never be...Socket 7!!!11

And anyway, K6 was never meant to go head on with Katmai (at least iirc), that was Athlon's job 😉

Iris030380 wrote:

Thanks a million. I will have me one of those!

Np mate 😉

Maybe it's better to get a couple of them, I'll bet he's only got a couple hundred left hehe 😜
I got a whole tray as I wanted spare parts and for Socket 7, it doesn't really come any better then this 😉

Tetrium wrote:

And anyway, K6 was never meant to go head on with Katmai (at least iirc), that was Athlon's job 😉

RogueTrip asked about how Katmai and K6-3+ compare. Katmai came out 6 months before Athlon and so it was competing with K6-2 and K6-III. It actually came out just a few months after K6-III.

Also, Deschutes and Katmai perform pretty much the same at the same clock speed. A P2-450 will beat a K6-3+ 600 in 3D games from what I've seen. I did a side by side test of UT99 with a K6-3+ 600 and the P3-450 (w/ Voodoo5) and the P3 had better overall framerate. Was disheartening 🤣

swaaye wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

And anyway, K6 was never meant to go head on with Katmai (at least iirc), that was Athlon's job 😉

RogueTrip asked about how Katmai and K6-3+ compare. Katmai came out 6 months before Athlon and so it was competing with K6-2 and K6-III. It actually came out just a few months after K6-III.

Well, you have a point there 😉

But Intel did decide to name their upcoming Pentium 2+ (=Katmai) to Pentium 3 with Athlon at it's heels 😜
After all, Katmai = Deschutes + SSE, basically 😜

@Tetrium: Thanks! Always a worry when on ebay. The other day when we were talking tualatins I seen some people on ebay listing coppermines at Tually's. Even seen a few vid cards recently sold at AGP when the pic showed PCI interconnect.

Sad, I used to own a K6-2 400 or 450, it seemed pitiful even to my overclock Pentium 1 166MMX @250Mhz! Oh well, it was reliable and cheap for its time. I still have a 500 and 550 K6-2. I'll probably never build with them though.

@Iris, have you thought about getting a Voodoo 3 AGP/PCI card. I never relized how good those cards where until I got mine the other day. The 3000 and 3500 are about the same performance as V2 SLI. The IQ of Quake 2 looks great on it. Only this is that the card is 16-bit only.

On a side note after researching about Voodoos
V2 (faster clocked voodoo 1)
V3 (V2 SLI performance on one board, only 16-bit but can play at res higher than 1024x768)
V5 4500 (V3 3500 performance with 32-bit color, and AA, large texture support)

Thats alot of Sidestepping upgrades!!

It's too bad the K6 series FPU could never match that of the Pentium. Though in the 1990s, I suppose that wasn't too big of a deal. I remember the K6 series being a great chip to run Windows 98 with.

The Pentiums were mega expensive in the 90s. AMD was your best friend if you liked your money.

The nice thing about 90s hardware for me is that I was still a little kid and, thus, the hardware I had was simply given to me by my parents.

Looking back, I remember the first system I ever owned that was actually built brand new vs. being used or a hand-me-down was a Celeron 300A box with an Abit motherboard running on the 440bx chipset and the graphics card was a 16mb TNT2 card. CPU was overclocked to 450mhz and it served me quite well for several years before I gave it to a family member who needed a computer.

leileilol wrote:

The Pentiums were mega expensive in the 90s. AMD was your best friend if you liked your money.

Created many a K6 fanboy. 😀

But they were cheap because they had to be. If they had been clearly superior they would not have been so cheap. See the pre-Core 2 Athlon 64 prices for some of that magic.