124 x 5 mhz is doable on air with a lucky pick of 450ACR. Unfortunately, most likely it will require about 2.35V to be Prime95 stable. AGP and PCI cards must be cherry picked as well, being driven out of specs. NIC cards will pose a big problem. Onboard L2 (L3) cache must be disabled. The MVP3 chipset rulez in this territory of overclocking.

100 x 6 needs a little less luck and less overvolt. L2 cache can work. Needs about 2.15 - 2.2 V. For me, it yielded little more than 5.5x100 on a GA 5AX but needed 2.25V.

I suggest searching at K6plus.com for results...

and

http://www.hardware.fr/myocdb.com/processeur129.html

I agree.

High fsb is not working on a lot of boards (stable) so the standard 100mhz fsb is the best setting and let you enable l3.

My k6-2+ and k6-3+ both run stable at 6x100 2,2v on Asus P5a boards (rev 1.03 and 1.04, later ones do NOT support the plus cpu`s). 5,5 x 110 does also work but isn`t 100% stable.

But indeed: anything over 550mhz doesn`t add a lot of performance so 550mhz is a good setting. If you want faster p3 is the way to go.....

I prefer the Ali chipset, only the Aopen ax59pro gave good results with the mvp3 chipset in my testing ( i tested 3 other brands). With agp cards, make sure you use the latest Ali agp driver.

I managed to find a Biostar M5ALA, which uses the ALi Aladdin V chipset, that I could afford. Does anyone have any experience with this board and a K6-2+ or 3+?

Ran it at 100 x 6 a few times for benchmarking.

What's the gain if you have to disable the cache?

The benefit of three level caching at 95 - 100 Mhz FSB is easily negated when having a much higher FSB without onboard cache. Games will bench faster at a significantly higher memory throughput than at a marginally better raw CPU score. If you have good quality RAM, you can still go to between 108 - 115 Mhz FSB with the tightest timings. That pays off.

I use 5*120 @ 2.0V with my K6-3+ on my Gigabyte Ga-5AX. Motherboard cache disabled.

Its stable but if I use more than a single memory stick I lose performance for some reason.
Perhaps write allocation gets disabled (although activated in the BIOS setup) when I use more than one memory stick.
Its a non issue however as the system runs perfectly with a single 256 MB stick.

edit +h

Yeah there's no doubt that maybe the primary bottleneck of K6 is RAM performance. The motherboard cache is so low clocked and lacking a dedicated bus that it becomes pretty useless. Chipset quality is not exactly superb either and probably part of the problem.

Unfortunately I don't have an MVP3 platform. Currently I own a P5A-B and a P5S-VM.
P5S-VM is based on SiS530 chipset and officially supports 133MHz FSB and 1/4 PCI divider. My K6-3+ 450APZ can run 133x4.5 on it. Onboard cache disabled as well as onboard video chip. Oddly the CPU refuses to work under 2.0V on the board even at default 100x4.5; it needs 2.2V to power up.
P5A-B does offer up to 150MHz FSB although officially at 120MHz. The downside is that P5A-B does not offer 1/4 divider for PCI devices, so anything over 100MHz is "out of spec". I can have my K6-3+ running at 120x5 under 2.0V, but no luck getting 133MHz to work.
I don't disabling the onboard cache is that big of a deal since K6-3 comes with built-in full speed L2 cache.

hello guyz, i would recommend winquake and 3dnow-quake2's software rendering as the hardest stability test for k6-2/k6-3s. some cpu that appeared stable in prime95/linx may crash in it. set resolution to 640*480 or even 800*600, and timedemo the bigass demo for winquake, or massive1 and crusher for quake2.
3dmark2000/01 may be an option too.

lazibayer wrote:

Unfortunately I don't have an MVP3 platform. Currently I own a P5A-B and a P5S-VM. P5S-VM is based on SiS530 chipset and offici […]
Show full quote

Unfortunately I don't have an MVP3 platform. Currently I own a P5A-B and a P5S-VM.
P5S-VM is based on SiS530 chipset and officially supports 133MHz FSB and 1/4 PCI divider. My K6-3+ 450APZ can run 133x4.5 on it. Onboard cache disabled as well as onboard video chip. Oddly the CPU refuses to work under 2.0V on the board even at default 100x4.5; it needs 2.2V to power up.
P5A-B does offer up to 150MHz FSB although officially at 120MHz. The downside is that P5A-B does not offer 1/4 divider for PCI devices, so anything over 100MHz is "out of spec". I can have my K6-3+ running at 120x5 under 2.0V, but no luck getting 133MHz to work.
I don't disabling the onboard cache is that big of a deal since K6-3 comes with built-in full speed L2 cache.

Today I got my P5A-B to boot into XP at 133x4.5. The voltage is set to 2.0VCore/4.0VIO. Boot with Elsa Gloria Synergy PCI; BSOD with my favorite FireGL2. Not quite stable, though; might need heatsink for north bridge.

Damn, using a 133MHz FSB should really push things for the K6-III+, it's a shame it is so tough to get it stable.

I have a K6-III+ 400 ATZ and a GA-5AX rev. 4.1. At 400MHz, it requires a mere 1.6V and at 550MHz, I've found 1.9V to be totally stable and have run it like that for years. However, attempting to boot at 600MHz, I always get a hang at POST or even before POST even shows up on screen. I've gone as far as 2.4V and still get the same results. Do you think there's even a small chance it could be due to the motherboard or do I just need to get another K6-III+ to hit 600MHz?

Also, has anyone tried both an MVP3 and Aladdin V motherboard? Which one do you think is better and why?

F2bnp wrote:

Damn, using a 133MHz FSB should really push things for the K6-III+, it's a shame it is so tough to get it stable.

I have a K6-III+ 400 ATZ and a GA-5AX rev. 4.1. At 400MHz, it requires a mere 1.6V and at 550MHz, I've found 1.9V to be totally stable and have run it like that for years. However, attempting to boot at 600MHz, I always get a hang at POST or even before POST even shows up on screen. I've gone as far as 2.4V and still get the same results. Do you think there's even a small chance it could be due to the motherboard or do I just need to get another K6-III+ to hit 600MHz?

Also, has anyone tried both an MVP3 and Aladdin V motherboard? Which one do you think is better and why?

mvp3 is faster at low fsb due to its large cache, ali5 is better for record-setting extreme overclocking.

A lot of mvp3 boards came with 512kb cache, just as the ali boards. People allways talk about the 2 mb boards of the mvp3 but very few actually have one....

Both are good boards i guess as long as it was a good manufacturer. I prefer the ali chipset as it gives me less troubles (p5a is favorite). The Aopen ax59pro is a very good board too (with mvp3).

Both chipsets are rubbish when not used with the right drivers. Early drivers gave them a bad name, later ones are stable.

Sweet spot for the + cpu's is 550mhz. Above that there is not much to gain and much harder to get 100% stable.

TNT(2) cards can give troubles with agp on the Ali, Geforce2 i had absolutely no problems.

F2bnp wrote:

Damn, using a 133MHz FSB should really push things for the K6-III+, it's a shame it is so tough to get it stable.

I have a K6-III+ 400 ATZ and a GA-5AX rev. 4.1. At 400MHz, it requires a mere 1.6V and at 550MHz, I've found 1.9V to be totally stable and have run it like that for years. However, attempting to boot at 600MHz, I always get a hang at POST or even before POST even shows up on screen. I've gone as far as 2.4V and still get the same results. Do you think there's even a small chance it could be due to the motherboard or do I just need to get another K6-III+ to hit 600MHz?

Also, has anyone tried both an MVP3 and Aladdin V motherboard? Which one do you think is better and why?

What heatsink/fan do you use?
I feel like K6-3+'s are really picky at heatsink/fan choices when hitting 600MHz. So far I can't stabilize any of my K6-3+'s at 600MHz with pure aluminum socket 7/A/370 coolers. It's odd that the computer will crash when the heatsinks are barely warm. Copper-based Athlon XP and P4 coolers work well, if you can find ways to fix them on the board. I made my own copper-based cooler by gluing a thick piece (1/4 x 1 x 1 inch) of copper to the bottom of an aluminum socket A/370 cooler with thermal adhesive and it works.

I removed the heatspreader from my k6-III+ and run it at 600mhz on a ga-5ax rev 4.1 @ 1.6v without any issues.

gravitone wrote:

I removed the heatspreader from my k6-III+ and run it at 600mhz on a ga-5ax rev 4.1 @ 1.6v without any issues.

I once did that to a K6-2+/500ACR and chipped a corner when installing the cooler. It died of course. I killed another Athlon XP, and another Power G4 in similar fashion.

meljor wrote:

A lot of mvp3 boards came with 512kb cache, just as the ali boards. People allways talk about the 2 mb boards of the mvp3 but very few actually have one....

actually there are quite a few models of mvp3 boards with 2mb cache produced by fic, tyan, epox, dfi, and the tmc that i am using... especially epox and tmc that has released several 2mb models.

but yeah, any socket7 boards are not very easy to come across today. so if you found just a few of them, its possible that none of them are 2mb mvp3 models.

meljor wrote:

A lot of mvp3 boards came with 512kb cache, just as the ali boards. People allways talk about the 2 mb boards of the mvp3 but ve […]
Show full quote

A lot of mvp3 boards came with 512kb cache, just as the ali boards. People allways talk about the 2 mb boards of the mvp3 but very few actually have one....

Both are good boards i guess as long as it was a good manufacturer. I prefer the ali chipset as it gives me less troubles (p5a is favorite). The Aopen ax59pro is a very good board too (with mvp3).

Both chipsets are rubbish when not used with the right drivers. Early drivers gave them a bad name, later ones are stable.

Sweet spot for the + cpu's is 550mhz. Above that there is not much to gain and much harder to get 100% stable.

TNT(2) cards can give troubles with agp on the Ali, Geforce2 i had absolutely no problems.

If you're only going to run them at 550, is there really any advantage over a non-plus K6-2 or III that's actually rated for 550?