I have a retail Klamath. I actually undervolted the fan on it cuz it's a whiny little thing. Not that hot really. Slot 1 is rather easy to cool too unlike those Super 7 boards that loved to put capacitors around the socket. The giant fanless P2 OEM heatsinks are very nice.

Unreal actually runs a lot better on a P2 even with Glide. P2 does MMX better and that's part of it. But there's also the poor memory and cache bandwidth, the poor AGP support, and the weak FPU. It is less of a disaster than Cyrix products at the time though!

I do realize that a lot of people have a special place in their heart for K6 though cuz it was cheap and made it possible for them to build a game box in their youth. 😀

Yeah I made a cheap K6-2 400 box for my kids to play on, but I couldn't believe how much faster my overclocked Celeron 300A was. Sure, the chip came at half the cost, but had half the performance when it came to gaming.

I never could get that k6-2 to budge past 400. 🙁

I wonder if one could use a 66mhz bus Coppermine Celeron with a slotket on a 440LX based motherboard. If so, then that'd be a good upgrade for one of those systems.

swaaye wrote:

I have a retail Klamath. I actually undervolted the fan on it cuz it's a whiny little thing. Not that hot really. Slot 1 is rather easy to cool too unlike those Super 7 boards that loved to put capacitors around the socket. The giant fanless P2 OEM heatsinks are very nice.

Unreal actually runs a lot better on a P2 even with Glide. P2 does MMX better and that's part of it. But there's also the poor memory and cache bandwidth, the poor AGP support, and the weak FPU. It is less of a disaster than Cyrix products at the time though!

I do realize that a lot of people have a special place in their heart for K6 though cuz it was cheap and made it possible for them to build a game box in their youth. 😀

I agree. It' easy to forget now juts how expensive some of that stuff was at the time. You can get good P3 board and 700-800 MHz processor for $50 or less. In its heydey that would have cost $400 minimum.

GXL750 wrote:

I wonder if one could use a 66mhz bus Coppermine Celeron with a slotket on a 440LX based motherboard. If so, then that'd be a good upgrade for one of those systems.

I actually tried that and it didn't work.
I bought a 266MHz Klamath system with a 440LX chipset brand new, and couldn't afford a new system for a few years. I picked up a cheap second hand coppermine celeron and a slotket, but it wouldn't POST with the latest available BIOS. I was stuck with it until I upgraded to an Athlon XP 1800+.

Was kind of annoyed once I'd realised that I should have waited until the BX chipset came out so I could take advantage of the cheap upgrades 😒

bushwack wrote:

I never could get that k6-2 to budge past 400. 🙁

Anything after 300MHz on a K6-2 is pretty much a waste.

It's true of any processor that you see diminishing returns ramping up the multiplier - that's why bus speed is so important

K6-2 becomes especially bottlenecked because the L2 cache is on the motherboard, stuck at FSB clock. It's barely faster than the RAM. P6 on the other hand has a separate cache bus and the cache clock always increases by some ratio to the CPU clock. So P6 is less affected by an increasing FSB bottleneck.

K6-III of course is AMD's solution to scaling problems but unfortunately it couldn't even clock as high as K6-2 until it went to 180nm. It still has the same FPU and the same memory performance problems though thanks to the poor chipsets.

swaaye wrote:

I do realize that a lot of people have a special place in their heart for K6 though cuz it was cheap and made it possible for them to build a game box in their youth. 😀

I do realize K6-X had a weak FPU and the other limits (think cacheable area) but I still see it as a beefed up Socket 7.
AMD pushed Socket 7 to it's limits and that's what I find interesting about it, especially since Socket 7 does have a special place in my heart somehow, even though I never owned one when it was new!

The P6 architecture was of course much better, but the platform is also more boring, except for the early Celerons, unlockable P2's and the max clocked Coppermines/Tualatins.
Socket 7 had countless different chips to choose from like the Pentium (overdrive), K5, K6-X, Cyrix MII.

I do dislike the caps around the socket things though.

If by boring you mean extremely easy to set up and work without any problems whatsoever on a BX board, then yes Slot 1 is quite boring 😜.
Like it has been said, the K6 and K6-2 and K6-3 were really good performers in their time. Performance to price ratio was very high, but Intel always was faster. In 1998-1999 I would have gone for a K6 system, but nowdays they cannot be found as easily as Pentium 2/3 systems. So, they actually cost more money than Intel counterparts! The interesting thing about the series is also its biggest problem. They are just faster Pentium MMXs.

Tetrium wrote:

AMD pushed Socket 7 to it's limits and that's what I find interesting about it, especially since Socket 7 does have a special place in my heart somehow, even though I never owned one when it was new!.

And that's what it's all about heh? 😀 Building these retro systems is purely a nostalgia trip. So for many s7 was their first system and a P3 was ferociously expensive compared with s7 when new. My first pc was a s7 P166MMX rig- played endless hours of Quake, Imperialism, AoE, SC on it. I stretched it's life beyond it's use-by date, waited out minor updates and finally got myself one of those new-fangled thingamajicbob P3 systems. paid a fat sum for it too. But whooohooo! What a ride! It was like comparing night and day.

Tetrium wrote:

I do dislike the caps around the socket things though.

And them caps get bad. Despite the Klamath's huge fab process and voltage- it actually isn't that hot due to the huge heatsinks mounted on them. But a K6-2 is a small fireplace and always feels a bit "on-the-edge" to run.

F2bnp wrote:

If by boring you mean extremely easy to set up and work without any problems whatsoever on a BX board, then yes Slot 1 is quite boring 😜.

Hehe, thats exactly what I meant ;D

I agree that when it comes to performance and stability, BX/815 is the best choice. But I have to say that the problems super 7 had, I never experienced first hand. My super 7 rig has performed beautifully, same for my Celeron 400 rig, which is now in pieces alas.
Still got my Celeron 800 rig and a couple newly build rigs (P3-1000 and P3-1400) and the Celeron I use currently for games that won't run properly in XP. It's actually seeing regular use at the moment 😀
And the jumpers on Super 7 make it easy to test various CPU speeds in benchmarks, just to name something. There are of course options for unlocked P6's but those are limited to either unlocked P2's (hard to find due to the majority of the Deschutes ones being locked) or ES's (even harder to find).

But I agree with the rest that at this time, P6 is cheaper, more stable (thanks to it's BX/815 chipset), faster and easier to set up (due to the slot 1 cooling solution and the bigger heatsinks available to the Coppermines/Tualatins).

Coppermine (and to a lesser extend the Tualatin) was a fantastic platform, and even today it's basically foolproof, except that it was the begin of the caps plague 🙁

I never did care for the slot architecture. That was one thing K6-2/3 had going for it - it was a socketed chip. IMHO that gives you a wider range of coolers to choose from.

F2bnp wrote:

If by boring you mean extremely easy to set up and work without any problems whatsoever on a BX board, then yes Slot 1 is quite boring 😜.

In and of itself, the 440BX format is not fault free by any means. I have had plenty of issues with those boards either not putting out enough power to AGP cards, or having other stability issues with certain AGP cards. Probably the worst one I have ever had to deal with was the P2B and P3B-F. If I had to choose only one platform for games from 1998 and prior(pre Athlon era), I would choose Super Socket 7 any day of the week due to that, as I have had next to no issues setting up systems based on those boards for classic gaming.

Well I think you have had uniquely negative experiences with 440BX. The worst problems I've had with it is pickyness about which PCI cards go in which PCI slot. I have run just about every AGP card imaginable off of my Abit BF6.

440LX on the other hand... 🤣

Apart from the aforementioned issues with coppermine and 100MHz FSB support, my LX system never missed a beat. I ran a few different video cards such as the S3 VIRGE it came with, a TNT2 Vanta and a Xabre 400 (which was a very finicky card, wouldn't work with many VIA chipsets at all).

Savage 2000 is very picky too. Good old S3 junk.

swaaye wrote:

Well I think you have had uniquely negative experiences with 440BX. The worst problems I've had with it is pickyness about which PCI cards go in which PCI slot. I have run just about every AGP card imaginable off of my Abit BF6.

Ahh no, it actually wasn't all that unique. The other member here that I know, Quoth09, suffered the same issue in fact with the P3B-f and the Voodoo 3 3000 and AIW 8500. He was the first I knew of to deal with the mess, when I first got into computer gaming, and after that I'd see people post about it off and on.

In 2005 when I started getting a lot of parts in, half the 440BX system pulls I got in did not like running with anything much more powerful then a TNT1, but the worst ones were the Asus boards I mentioned. Googling and lurking around diff forums on old thread post showed this was a common voltage problem on older early gen 440BX based boards, and it was never really sorted out with a bios fix. Overclock results really sucked when trying to use a AGP card on 440BX also. That same grafx card could handle a bump up on the AGP speed on another platform fine, but on the 440BX, nope, GF2 GTS freeze freeze freeze. Nothing like seeing Max Payne dive to dodge some bullets and have him freeze midway through.

Due to that I am really picky about what slot 1 boards I am willing to keep around in storage, mainly sticking with the VIA ones. In general, yeah, I know others out there love Intel and the 440BX, but I could care less. There is better more flexible hardware out there from that generation, not just on the AMD side, but on the Socket 370 also.

ProfessorProfessorson wrote:

Due to that I am really picky about what slot 1 boards I am willing to keep around in storage, mainly sticking with the VIA ones. In general, yeah, I know others out there love Intel and the 440BX, but I could care less. There is better more flexible hardware out there from that generation, not just on the AMD side, but on the Socket 370 also.

I've had great experiences with the 440BX, 810, 815E and even the 820 (which was my first P3- bought new- I wanted the "best" back then 😜). But I like the VIA Apollo too- the later 133A and 133X versions combined all the benefits of every Intel chipset, and none of the drawbacks.