Quick update. And maybe some advice....
I was able to flash this BIOS and get the CPU to recognize and work correctly. There is no 2.2v jumper setting on my motherboard, so I set it to the lowest (2.5v)
From what I was able to read online, only the revision 3.2a and 7.0 boards have a 2.2v setting, but I couldn't find any clear way to determine the difference between a 3.2 and 3.2a revision.
One site noted that a black surround around the keyboard DIN connector identified the board as a 3.2a revision. Mine is black but also clearly marked 3.2 with no "a" present.
At any rate I rolled the dice, flashed the BIOS and the chip is recognized and working at both 75mhz and 83mhz FSB speeds.
The problem is that it is widly unstable with any IDE devices. With any drives be it optical or HDD it will hang at POST about half the time during NVRAM count. Usually removing and power and doing a cold boot resolves this but not always.
It seems to be far more stable although not perfect with only drives connected to the secondary channel.
I can usually get it to boot to floppy/CD/HDD on this channel and can even fdisk/create partitions/format and create directories.
However.....If I try to copy files to the drive (I've tried 5 different drives, all known good) I get read/write errors. Retrying always seems to work. I've used three different Win98/ME discs. All working fine in other PC's and even burned a fresh copy, I've also tried multiple optical drives and cables. All working fine on other systems.
If I try to run the installer directly from the disk or from the Win98 directory after finally getting files copied I get a "Invalid FAT" error during SCANDISK. I get the same error every single time on every single drive I try.
Reformatting doesn't help. If I let Scandisk fix the errors and setup tries to launch then It fails with a invalid cab file message.
I've tried multiple known good sticks of RAM, tried disabling motherboard cache.....a few other things.
I've NOT tried a different power supply or tried swapping back in a different CPU or reverting back to the old BIOS.
What are all of your opinions?
I'm planing on trying a PCI-IDE RAID card that I had at work, andy maybe even a SCSI card/drive if I can find my SCSI cables.
But maybe the board is just crap? It seemed to work ok with the old K6 chip before I flashed it but I did very little testing and didn't try to boot or install anything. The caps LOOK fine, but that means little.
Maybe I've made the CPU unstable with too much voltage? I can' try a K6-2 350 that I know works, I've also got a 166mmx and the K6-200 that came in it, maybe a few others. But really wanted to use my k6-3+ of course.
Maybe I should try throwing in a ATX power supply?
Even though the AT power supply was working fine with my 486 build just a few months ago. It isn't old it is a new cheapie brand from Amazon......
But I've never had this much trouble with drive corruption just trying to install Windows before. Even back in the day.
I'm open to suggestions if anyone can think of something I've overlooked......