Can the AMD K6-2+ 550 match the Pentium II?

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[apachelives]

The main thing about these K6 2 / K6 3 processors is they were able to drop into just about all older Socket 7 motherboards and continue to perform great for years after Intel abandoned the platform. Picture upgrading from a Pentium 1 to a K6 2 400mhz probably doubling the performance with a simple drop in upgrade, and those Pentium 2's and 3's back then were not cheap. Typical AMD making a consumer friendly product and a lasting platform vs Intel constantly changing platforms.

[Alchemist]

must say been an awesome ride down memory lane with all your retro pc builds. i started off with the 286 and loved a 386amd dx40 back in the day.. just recently got donated a pt 100mhz cpu board and 16mb ram o what fun lol

[homeycdawg]

I had a k6-II 550 in the late 90s. It was a nice cheap and powerful upgrade over my k6-II 300. They made a special Quake 2 "3D-Now!" driver which basically doubled the FPS in that game.

[xys]

I still have aluminum cover of a K6-2/350AFR (2.2V) that was running at 616Mhz (5, 5x112Mhz) 3, 3V (with aluminum cover removed). YES, it was 3, 3V !!!, max what I could jumper out on FIC VA-503+ motherboard. It was also posting at 672Mhz (6*112) but was crushing while booting. One day I decided try some voltage settings for some Cyrix processor, which was 3, 5V ... and it was the end of this processor...

[Digi]

Back in the days, i upgraded from my first PC with a 200Mhz Pentium MXX to a 350Mhz K6-2 (it was a recommendation from the local hardware store as i was not so experienced). It was quicker, but not THAT much and it always got anhilated from the PII 266 a friend had in its system. The PII of of course was much more expensive and some later games which utilized the 3DNow Instructions run quite well on the k6-2, but overall it was not a good upgrade considering the costs for memory and super socket 7 board. lesson learned. the next pc i build myself.

[herrbonk]

Short anser to a pretty complex question: Clock for clock, the K6 line was faster than the P6 line on x86 instructions, but slower on x87 (floating point) instructions.

[Fbnp]

Great video Phil!

I should mention that you can achieve even greater performance in CPU bound titles by using a 3Dfx card like the Voodoo3 or 5. GeForce cards will help in MDK2 and other TnL enabled titles, but for the rest of them, 3Dfx helps quite a bit because their driver had less CPU overhead apparently and it truly does show on benchmarks. Of course, for games that also support Glide, you can get even lower CPU overhead and that also helps quite a bit.

Someone here has mentioned the K6-III+ and whether or not that will help in raising performance. It's not a big jump, it seems like the 128KB cache go a long way already in uplifting the performance compared to a standard K6-2, so the 256KB on the K6-III+ will only give you a couple more frames in most situations.

I've also seen that using 128MB RAM instead of 256MB on Aladdin V gives you a couple more fps on average, MVP3 does not suffer from this. Add all of these in the mix, maybe push another 50MHz to reach 600MHz if you're lucky and you can get these little guys to be even more competitive!

[alfredklek]

I had a standard k6-2 550 chip in the early 2000s. I remember that it ran hot and was unstable. I actually ran it underclocked to 500 MHz to keep it cool and used it like that for something like 3 years. Don't get me wrong, I'm an AMD guy but I think they tried to push that chip just a little harder than it could bear.

[BusygrowUk]

I had a Cyrix 6x86 pr166+ back in those days, I remember I would have to turn off all the caches to get some games to work God's, Zool 2, Hind? few others.

[JamieBainbridge]

One minor correction, cache stores *recently* used data. The idea being that if you've fetched a page from RAM once, you're probably going to use it again in the future. For example, reading a texture from storage and then later performing operations against that texture to color it or apply it to different models in different ways. The CPU usually doesn't know the cache is there, the cache just handles all memory accesses and serves cached pages from its own cache memory.

[mariolis]

Just dug up an old windows 98 laptop that i used to play with as a kid ... turns out it has a K6-2 450 cpu, has 28MB of RAM and 5GB of storage, a floppy and even a cd-rom drive

back then i had no idea what it did but i knew it was old and outdated (i was born in 2001 for reference)

now im currently an Electrical Engineering student and happened to discover this old gem, still works perfectly fine

i wonder what i can do with it, i have wanted to tinker with old windows and dos for years and thought this laptop was gone ... thought my parents had thrown it out or gave it away but no... it was in our basement and it still works perfectly

thats why i clicked on this video, to find more about the K6-2 thats inside

Edit after watching: Kinda dissapointed to see that the K6-2 500 non-plus is on the same level as the PII 330 ... which makes my 450 on the same level as the PII 300 but i wasnt really expecting anything when I dug it up, i would have been happy even if it was a 386 or 486 system, whatever it is i am gonna do a lot of tinkering with it

definitely will play dos games, maybe trying to run tinycore linux on it, or maybe try to even program my own DOS game for it using C or C++ as Im quite familiar with both

[alecjahn]

I had a Super 7 computer back in the day, it was a garage sale find and my first "all to myself!" computer (in comparison to the newer family computer). Naturally I eventually sold it in another garage sale after I found an old Dell PIII for $5 at another sale. wish I'd kept it, I would have so much fun playing with it now.

[DanielLopez-upos]

Very awesome Thowback to the K6 Processors.

[petertorda]

I remember first Celeron 266 (slot 1), which we overclocked with stock cooler into 448Mhz, that was really free performance. :-D

[jamespilcher]

I had a k6-2 500 which was great. Then I bought my mum a k6-2 550, and it bluescreened constantly until i underclocked it to 500MHz

[lordmmx]

K6-2 i think also had special multiplier setting for older boards, where when you set multiplier to 2x, cpu recognized it as 6x and ran at full speed (6x66mhz = 400mhz circa). I used that cpu in old fujitsu siemens pc that officially supported only pentium mmx up to 200mhz. worked like a charm

[charonunderground]

Jak zwykle bardzo dobre video. From Poland

PS. interesting comparison would be K6-2+ 550 and Athlon 550 Slot A

[Overlxrd_]

Just got a computer with an AMD K6-2 450 on the same motherboard.
I love the ceramic design of the CPU!
Thanks for the video :)

Full configuration:

- CM: Gigabyte GA-5AX
- CPU: AMD K6-2 450 Mhz
- RAM: SDRAM 256 mo
- GPU: Rage 128 32mb
- Carte Son: Advance Logic 120

[heidirichter]

Well done, the music was a huge improvement this time. Not perfect, but it didn't make me want to completely mute the video this time either.

On the topic of the video itself, well done. Am I right in recalling that the FPU performance in the whole K62 range wasn't as good as the Intel CPUs, so games that relied on the FPU didn't do as well as expected, but if they weren't reliant on FPU the K62s did quite well, and I remember them being much less expensive than the Intel chips.

I also remember going into several PC stores and having the sales staff at this time tell me to not buy an AMD system, "because they're just not as compatible, they will freeze and crash" but these same people also tried to tell me that the K62 was the first CPU AMD had ever made, that they were new to the market, and they didn't expect them to last. I had a great laugh at them at the time, as I had an AMD 386DX40 at home, which they denied ever existed, hahaha.

[MVCZ]

Thanks for the video and the utilities for "plus" cpu. They will come in handy. The K6-III+ are easily to find on ebay than K6-2+ and relatively cheap, though they are low voltage parts. Unfortunately my K6-III+ is still on the way, somewhere in the depot :(