matze79 wrote:

The K6-3 suffers still from a weak FPU and i can't really recommend it to play 3D Games 😀

Correct, though it seriously tempts me with it being known as one of the quickest clock-per-clock cpus ever made. I may tinker with one someday. I have an untested K6-3 400 sitting around somewhere.. I'll see what I can do with it. 3D gaming is optional, I would still appreciate a well made workhorse of a cpu.

matze79 wrote:

The K6-3 suffers still from a weak FPU and i can't really recommend it to play 3D Games 😀

Weaker then a PIII, on par wih a PII. The only thing holding the K6-III back is the slower socket 7 platform. 500MHz P II v.s. 500MHz P III v.s. 550MHz K6-III+ benchmarks!

This annoys me to no end since all the tests I've done show the K6-III to be on par with a Pentium II in 3d and slightly slower then a celeron, sans for P54C optimized games like quake. Yes, the K6-III takes a big hit in games like expandible, but the PII is not far ahead. In Quake, Quake 2, Half-Life, Dungeon Keeper II, Hexen II and other period games the K6-III will perform just like an equivalently clocked Pentium II. Not to mention there are some 3dnow patches witch give it a 20% advantage over the pentium II. Some games even naively support 3dnow (homeworld) - so overall the K6-III is NOT slower then the PII in real world 3D (and is a lot faster in synthetics) - please stop spreading this bull.

The pentium III is another matter. It has SSE witch lots of later games use (best example would be Quake III) and scales up a lot better then the K6-III. A 600MHz PIII wrecks a 600MHz K6-III due to diminishing returns in the K6's risc86 architecture.

kanecvr wrote:

The pentium III is another matter. It has SSE witch lots of later games use (best example would be Quake III) and scales up a lot better then the K6-III. A 600MHz PIII wrecks a 600MHz K6-III due to diminishing returns in the K6's risc86 architecture.

Aha, the law of diminishing returns. Possibly makes overclocking not as worthwhile.

BTW, I'm sure if this is related, but I would think the K6-2 550 was considered a "dog of a chip" due to the manufacturing process hitting it's limit. It was claimed to be even slower than a 450..

feipoa wrote:

As far as I am aware, a K6-III-450 is faster than a P233MMX in every application. If your only interest is 3D gaming, then all I can say for my own testing is that a K6-III-450 scored 32.6 fps with Quake II (OpenGL w/Matrox G200), while a P233MMX scored 22.7 fps. If you are looking to find out exactly which games a K6-III can play, whereby P233MMX cannot play at acceptable framerates, then you will need to hunt around for this data.

Thanks, so the faster K6 will benefit only in Windows 98 games.
As I understand it, if one is interested in a DOS system only to cover 386, 486 and Pentium, an MMX is the way to go.

I believe that for a Windows 98 machine a Pentium 3/4 will be much better than a Socket 7 with K6III+.

matze79 wrote:

The K6-3 suffers still from a weak FPU and i can't really recommend it to play 3D Games 😀

Relative to it's integer performance, I would agree. Relative to a PMMX, apparently this wasn't an issue with the debut of K6-2 series chips having integrated L2 cache.