I don't think 128MB is too restricting for a K6. I ran a K6-2 300 on a VX mainboard back in the day with 64 MB (maximum cacheable amount), and it certainly was sufficient. The K6 in it's original version isn't a very fast processor, compared to a P2, so you won't be able to run ressource intensive 98 games on it anyway.

It's not a super socket 7 processor, I suspect 100 MHz won't be stable. Can you get a K6-2 or K6-3? 100 MHz FSB will improve speed significantly.

Games wise it would be fine for my use (I plan on mating it with a 16mb agp voodoo3 - should be able to run quake3-level games or older i think?), I figured light web surfing with something like a recent version of k-meleon could use a bit more ram. If it won't be stable at 100fbs I'll try 75(4x multiplayer) or 83mhz(3.5x multiplayer), I'm pretty sure it can tolerate at least a bit more than 66.

From a bit of internet digging seems like this might be what i'd want to get:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/gigabyte-ga-5ax-rev-52.html

tametick wrote:

From a bit of internet digging seems like this might be what i'd want to get:

http://www.philscomputerlab.com/gigabyte-ga-5ax-rev-52.html

I can vouch for that board as well - especially the 5.2 revision. The Asus P5A is also a good, stable board.

Hrm, seems my local options are quite limited. This is the only relatively cheap motherboard (I'm in germany so I could get free shipment for this particular one) I found with the same chipset (ali 5), good enough of a compromise?

30 euro total, not too bad I guess...I also found a P5A but that would set me back 72 euros with shipment (+ a bunch of stuff I don't want, like an S3 graphics card) which is a bit more than I'd like to spend. How big of a difference am I likely to see between these?

Another one I forgot about - DFI K6BV3+/66 - pretty popular board.

http://www.dfi-itox.com/pages/products/mother … ialmb/k6bv3.php

The DFI P5BV3+ was the top performer back in the day according to this: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/socket-7- … 1998,79-23.html.

a surviving one. Most SS7 boards were often cheaply produced and wouldn't last after a few years of use (read: not one year of use and 16 years of hoarding), be it capacitors or not

Asus p5a, rock solid boards. Aopen ax59pro also very good.

The ali board you are pointing at at ebay doesn't have agp....

Oh! I didn't even notice, thanks 😀

This one is a previous revision of one of Artex's suggestion & also 30 euros with free shipping - it only caches 256mb of ram but I can live with that I think.

All the p5a's I found were super expensive (more than twice the price of the above).

Asus also sold the P5A in AT form as the P5A-B if you want to expand your search. I own both the AT and ATX variants. It was a stable board for the most part and free of the evils of VIA.

tametick wrote:

Hi, I'm getting an old Amd K6 cpu @ 300mhz and I'm looking for a super socket 7 motherboard to put it in. […]
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Hi,
I'm getting an old Amd K6 cpu @ 300mhz and I'm looking for a super socket 7 motherboard to put it in.

It appears that some of these old mobos could only cache the first 128/256/512mb ram & beyond that performance would degrade considerably. Since win98 probably can't handle more than 256-512mb very well anyway I don't mind the latter but 128mb would be very restricting.

Another consideration is that I want to overlcock the FSB up to 100mhz (to use with pc100 or pc133 sd-ram), so that I go from 4.5*66mhz to 3*100mhz (keeping the cpu at its original 300mhz speed).

I don't need a ton of ports, just agp(2x), at least 3 PCI & maybe and 1 ISA. Would also be nice if it isn't too big (e.g. baby-at size). And while we're at it having ATX power would also be nice, so I won't have to hunt down an old AT powersupply :p

So given these parameters, which old mobo fits best?

Do you need the best SS7 board, or the board that best fits your needs? I think for K6-300 a well built 2MB-cached MVP3 or ALI A5 will be more than sufficient. The criteria for the best SS7 board, in my perspective, such as 133FSB, 1/4 PCI divider, 1.3V core, will be overkill for a K6.

for record setting extreme overclocking, gigabyte 5ax v5.2 is undoubtedly the best ali5 board you can get.

for long term stable usage, i would go with mvp3 boards: dfi k6xv3/66, epox mvp3g5, tyan trinity1598. my tmc ti5vgf is pretty satisfying too but it only supports dma33 with 586b southbridge, tmc has another ti5vga-ultra model that uses 686a southbridge and has dma66 support.

and about onboard cache, it has critical impact on mvp3 performance but almost no impact on ali5 performance. so you can forget it if you want an ali5, but for mvp3 you must go for 2mb models.

Yeah I meant best according to these parameters not overall "best". I don't intend on doing extreme overclocking etc.

So just to consolidate the data for future reference, some recommended motherboards are:

• gigabyte ga-5ax
• Asus P5A or P5A-B
• DFI K6BV3+/66
• DFI P5BV3+
• Aopen ax59pro
• epox mvp3g5
• tyan trinity1598
• tmc ti5vga-ultra

Another question - if we're talking fairly late mobos (late 90s), does it matter if I get Baby-AT or ATX? Or can I assume that any baby-at from that era will support ATX powersupply and i'll be able to stuff it somehow into an ATX case?

ATX for sure. There are only very few ATX cases that can hold AT motherboards.

I can vouch for the IWill XA100 Plus and the Shuttle HOT-597. The former is ALI Alladin 5 and the latter is VIA MVP3.

ATX is preferable because is easier to work with, although AT has its value if you wanna use older PSU's and full lenght ISA cards.

The QDI Titanium IB+ is one of the best AT boards although its not Super Socket 7. But a BIOS upgrade can make it support AMD K6+ CPU's which give a good speed boost. It is based on the Intel Triton chipset which in my opinion is very very good.

carlostex wrote:

The QDI Titanium IB+ is one of the best AT boards although its not Super Socket 7. But a BIOS upgrade can make it support AMD K6+ CPU's which give a good speed boost. It is based on the Intel Triton chipset which in my opinion is very very good.

I can vouch for this process. I had a K6-2 333 paired with one of these boards.