AMD K6 2 and Socket 7 Mainboard

[Guest]

Could anyone please tell me if you K6 II 500 MHz processor is compatible with my computer (socket 7 mainboard)?

I have installed the K6 2 500MHz processor and can only get my computer to run at 290MHz (3.5 X 83 MHz). The computer can recognize the processor at 430MHz, but it crashes while loading windows 95. Yes, I have installed the patch from MSN, but it doesn't seem to do the trick. AMD processors supposedly have a built in logic that reads a setting of "2" as "6" on the clock multiplier, but this deosn't seem to my case either. I have had to configure manual jumper settings on my board to get anything to work, as my bios doesn't allow me to make the neccesary changes (bus speed, processor speed etc..).

I currently am running a Acer Aspire with a K6 233Mhz on board.

Aspire serial # 2601350073
Model # 1830
P/N 91.AB575.M01
Mainboard V58LA
Core Voltage 2.8V-3.52
Bus 66, 75 & 83 MHz

I have done a lot of research on the internet and I am running into conflicting information. Also, I am unable to find my motherboard on the net, and Acer's website as very limited information regarding my board.

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Brent]

I beleive you may need a Super Socket 7 mother board. I would sugest either FIC 503+ (atx/at conectors +accepts 72 pin edo sim or 168 pin dims),FIC PA2013(atx only i beleive) or a tyan trinity board(i beleive they have AT/ATX models available). I beleive these boards suport 100mhz bus plus the corect core voltage settings of 2.2volts. These boards should be available on the net for 50-75$ new

 

[Tormented]

Hmmm..
I have Asus tx97-xe and i`m running k6-2-500 mhz
just fine.
I just set the Board multiplier to 2x
and the voltage to 2.2v FSB to 83 MHz. And all works like charm.
The problems you might have is that
If the PC crashes at 83 FSB try setting the FSB to 75.
cause your PCi cards maybe to old to handle those speeds..
try playing with the FSB.and leave the Mult on 2x always!
It is the processor that mulriplies the 2x as 6x and not the board.


<b>-----------------------</b>
-<font color=red><b>R.K.</b></font color=red>

 

[BrianL]

I upgraded my PC Chips 571 mobo and it runs fine (now) with the k6-2/500. I did have to disable the onboard video and get a PCI graphics card to be able to run at 83 Mhz. I also had to set the PCI bus speed to CLK/2 instead of fixed at 33 Mhz as there seems to be a problem with asyncronous CPU/PCI bus ratios and the K6-2 in some boards. This does affect some older PCI cards as the bus speed is now 41.5 Mhz instead of the expected 33. It may shorten the life of the chipset from 20 years to 5 - bwc

How did you get the 2.2V for the processor or are you running a 2.4V version of the chip?

 

[Ncogneto]

your problem is most likely related to the fact you are trying to run at a 83.3 mhz bus, and alot of cards just dont like this. This coupled with the fact you are running your voltage way to high does not help either. With your current board you can expect perhaps 75 mhz x 6 = 450, to get any more would be totally dependent on the qualitu of your other cards, ie video, sound modem, etc. There are devices for people such as yourself out there that will allow you to get the correct voltage that work very well. You will have to way there cost to see if they are practical for you haowever. The two adapters that come to mind are from madex and powerleap and will allow you more flexabilit in choosing your voltage ( the madex in particular offers 2.0-3.5 volts and has its own power regulator, along with multipliers ranging from 2.0-6.0)
Bear in mind also that your older motherboard bios probably does not support the write back feature of the amd ctx core cpu. Thee are sereral utilities out there that will enable this feature giving you a 10%-30% increase in overall performance. Three such utilities include Setk6,rawpower, and cpuidle. Personally cpuidle is the easiest to use and configure and is shareware with a free 30 day trial period so thee is no risk involved. Give it a shot you have nothing to lose except time. What you ultimately decide will be what makes the most sense for you in terms of money spent. Below is a link to the download page of the two shareware programs I mentioned earlier.
http://www.cpuidle.de/

 

[BrianL]

I am not really sure what the connection is between the 83.3 MHZ FSB and your PCI cards functioning unless you ALSO modify the PCI bus speed and that is not a given just because the FSB changes. Lots of PCI cards are running at FSBs of 100 and 133 Mhz with no problems.
When overclocking boards, there are comprimises to be made and you have to decide what is best for you. Having so far in my life, personally carried 4 functioning computers to the garbage because of gross obselescence, I no longer pay much heed to concerns about stressing parts, shortening life and staying within spec. If it works, be happy

 

[Ncogneto]

Err, Brian, you really need to learn some of the basics before handing out advice that may damage or destroy someone else's computer. I will give you a quick lesson, one that applies to all motherboards with a few notable exceptions on some of the newer ones. Your pci bus ( isa as well for that matter) is a direct derivative of your motherboards front side bus. This is done by a divider, much like a clock multiplier but in reverse. The standard divider for older boards such as the one the postee has is 1/2. This means that that when running at 66.6fsb the pci bus is one half of that which is 33.3. Now when you up the system bus ( one method of overclocking) you in return also up the pci bus. For instance when you go to 75 mhz your pci bus is now at 37.5. this is usually acceptable as most pci cards ( not all) can handle this. However, when you up the bus to 83.3 now your pci bus is running at 41.7 ( give or take ) Most pci card simply cant handle this, at least not the older ones. Also be aware that your onboard controller also runns of the same pci bus. A few older MOBO's do have a jumper to lock the pci bus to 33.3 but not many. A few more have adjustmnts that you can make in the bios to set the divider ratio. as for your comment on some boards running at 100 yes this is correct however pc-100 boards simply use a 1/3 divider ratio ie 100/3=33.3. As you can tell the pci bus is still at 33.3. And last but not least pc-133 again uses a different divider 1/4 133/4=33.3. newer MOBO's will either set this automatically or give you this option in bios. But, the problem is when choosing FSB freq's between these three ranges as is the case in using a 83.3 bus. In this users post with what he states I highly doubt he has any options availble to him other then the locked 1/2 fsb to pci clock divider.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the info....I think I'll follow your lead and get a new mainboard to run the chip

Cheers

 

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply...

It is a 2.2V K6 2 processor..I purchased online from www.dealsdirect.com in Ottawa, ON Canada

I have decided to go for a new mainboard as well.

Thanks

 

[BrianL]

My "old" board gives you the option of locking the PCI bus at 33 MHZ regardless of FSB and it is not a particularily hi quality board. As I don't happen to have a couple of dozen other "old" boards to examine I can only draw my conclusions from my experience whith the 3 or 4 I have worked on. One was configured as you said, three were as I said.

As I said before, there are tradeoffs in overclocking and one is component stress and life expectancy. All I am saying is that pampering an old board that you are trying to squeeze another year of service out of is nuts given that the component life far exceeds it usefullness. The only thing I am careful of is heat on the CPU. Given that these old boards can be replaced for $30 vs paying several hundred for a new system, there is not much risk involved in souping them up. Most cards will quit functioning long before they are damaged permanently.

The gentleman has already paid more for his new processor than his mobo is worth. He is faced with the decision to not get value for money already spent or risk a bit more to achieve his original desire, to have a 500 Mhz machine. Its a question of spending a $100 for board which will run his processor with no problem or risk $30 to stay where he already is. There is really no decision involved

 

[Ncogneto]

However this gentlemans computer would need more than a motherboard seeing how it is an acer it very likely has a proprieory case, 72 pin sims, on board video, on and on and on. So replacing just the motherboard probably is not an option. Granted I agree, in the long run he is better off replacing these components, but in the interim if he does fry his computer and does not currently have the funds to replace all of them right now this leaves him without a computer and some people might not like this option. Also,
I forgot to mention that in addition to overclocking your pci bus using an 83.3 fsb,his memory is also running at that speed. Also,the gentleman already expressed that his current motherboard is not running at 83.3 so what exactly is your point? To hear you tell him that yours is running at the speed ( btw it really isn't working correctly unless you solved you dma issue with your hard drive) does him absolutely no good. You made an earlier statement that you see many other pci buss's running at 100 or even 133 mhz and this was way off the mark, where as you may not have written what you had meant to say still it read that way and to a novice taking you at what you said would think that a pci card could really run at 100 mhz when they are all spec'ed to run at 33.3. All I am trying to do is give the man the best workable option to have a running computer without doing any serious damage to the computer he now has untill he deems it time to buy newer parts. but seeing how you seem to doubt me try reading an old article by Dr. Tom himself regarding this very issue.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/97q3/970703/index.html
And for what it is worth, not all the jumpers that supposedly lock the pci bus at 33.3 really work

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[BrianL]

Too bad you don't know the difference between FSB and PCI bus speed and I totally agree with your last statement

 

[Ncogneto]

no my freind it is you that does not undestand the relationship between fsb and pci bus speed.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Guest]

i have never seen a motherboard that could lock the pci bus. You must have had some unusual boards there, i didn't even know it could be done. In reply to the original thread - if the motherboard supports 2.2v or even 2.4v then you probably do not need to replace it. Set it to 6*75 (or 2*75) = 450. Also if you have pc66 ram it might be unstable at 83 even if it run at 83 with another cpu. Your motherboard cache may be particularly cheap and may stop it runing at 83. Their is any number of reasons why 83 fsb can effect it. A major reason not to set the fsb to 83 particularly with older systems is that it can destroy hard drives or make them unstable. A friend of mine had to set hard drive to pio 4 to run with fsb of 83 - the same friend managed to destroy a maxtor hard drive with the same setting - couldn't figure out why it failed about 1 sec after booting at 83 fsb. But if he had looked around onj the net he would have descovered it was a well documented problem.

 

[BrianL]

Since you feel so strongly on the subject, I would assume that you have written Frank Volkel and chastized him for his two articles on this site in July and November "Oldie Tuning" and "Socket 7- Fit for years to come" Those in-depth articles explaining the use of the 500 MHZ CPUs in old socket 7 boards, all end up running the PCI bus at 41.7 Mhz and the FSB at 83 Mhz and he lists a substantial number of boards that it has been tried sucessfully on.

If I have to choose who to believe, him or you, You don't even make it to the start line.

 

[Ncogneto]

I agree 100 % not quite sure you why wrote that response in reply to me, however did you not mean to reply to BrianL? And yes, there are a few boards out there that do allow locking of the front side bus via jumper, they are rare and seldom does this jumper actually work. As for you Brianl, as I said before you have a simular post trying to use 83.3 and you cannot enable your dma at 83.3. So where you come of as being such an expert lord only knows. You keep trying to make a moot point and should just give up. Yes, in rare occasions with good periphials and a little luck sometimes people can succesfully use 83.3 as there FSB. The articles you refer to all point to this in a time where 83.3 was the top fsb possible and achieving it would give you maximum possible performance. These days are long gone, spending extra money to achieve this goal is impractical as well as just plain foolish. The risk envolved far out weigh any possible performance gain, how much a difference do you expect to see between 75 and 83.3, ie 450 and 500?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[Ncogneto]

further more Brian, you fail to address the issue of enabling the write back cache on the AMD cpu as none of these older boards that were not designed to use AMD cpu's are able to do this. Several programs are available that will do this. Any system running at 450 with wb enabled will out bench a sstem at 83.3 with write back non enabled.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!

 

[BrianL]

As this discussion is going nowhere I will bow out. All that is important to me is that I now have a board that I was going up throw out and it is now performing satisfactorily for another year while the new technologies are sorting themselves out. I have had none of the doomsdays prophicies on my equipment that you espouse and I am content. Whether or not my writeback cach is enabled or not, really is of no consequence to me as the overall performance of my system is up considerably. If it was,I would buy a newer board.

I would assume that most people who tinker inside their computers, do so out of personal interest not necessity and anything that improves performance without seriously damaging anything is fair game. The person who started this message has already opted to get a new board and that is his decision.

If you want to be a perfectionist then that is your bag and you shouldn't be criticising those of us that want to operate outside the box for fun or interest. As far as I am concerned anyone who buys a 500 Mhz CPU to run in an old 233 Mhz board has already indicated where he wants to be.

 

[Ncogneto]

That being said Brain seeing how you are trying approx the same as the user who posted this thread, I suggest trying the following software it has a free 30 day trial period so there is no risk involved. It would seem that seeing how you are interested in eeking out the most out of your system something for free that gives you 15 percent more performance should be of interest to you.

http://www.cpuidle.de/

This will give you roughly the same perfomance increase that upping your bus to 83.3 did. After installing it check the optimize cpu option and start with windows option. For quick benchmarks for comparisons you can try cpumark99 availble at zdnet.
Though not positive, I beleive if, in your system you run at 75 fsb, enable dma as opposed to non-enabled, and use this program you will have a better perfoming system than you currently have at 83.3 and dma non-enabled. what have you got to lose?

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing!