Overclocking The AMD K5
The K5 has been late in arriving, but is proving to be very powerful indeed. The latest performance figures show fairly nice results compared to the Pentium and the pricing of the K5 is just wonderful! 'How about the overclocking then?' I ask, 'after all AMD is the manufacturer of the most overclocked 486 CPUs in history'. My first overclocked CPU was an AMD 486/40 (to 50 MHz) then an AMD 486/100 (to 120 MHz) and everybody knows about the beautiful and cheap AMD 5x86-133, which just runs great at 160 MHz and still is faster than many P100 systems.
In my initial experience, the older PR75, PR90 and PR100 K5 CPUs are not great fellows for overclocking. Most of the time, the system would remain dead after moving up only one step and these versions share the same serious heat problem with the 6x86.
The PR120 and PR133, however, seem to be much better candidates. These two guys run at the same external and internal speed as the PR90 and PR100!! This proves that the chip inside has been improved and altered. Obviously these CPUs don't produce as much heat as the first incarnations, which is one of the first requirements for overclocking. The new PR150 and PR166 (at 120 and 133 MHz) seem to be of the same design.
Unfortunately I haven't got enough information to tell you anything decent about successful overclocking of the K5, but I hope that'll change. My Overclocking Survey has already got quite a lot of K5 entries.
