Yeah it sounds like the board is flaky because of age (caps?) or it was just junk to begin with. For example I know of a Socket8+Slot1 board by Supermicro that always had PCI problems. Do you plan on getting something else? The ASUS P5A is my favorite I think.

I should quality my "runs like ass" with the fact that I am comparing it to a P3 450. I did a comparison years ago with a Voodoo5 in both my K6-3+ @ 616 and P3 Katmai 450. The 450 was clearly faster. K6-3 performs like a P6 CPU of around half its clock speed in UT and Q3. I do wonder if there are integer-oriented games (probably 2D games) that it is more competitive with. The desktop experience with a K6-3 600 is probably better than a P3-450.

It's a real shame that both K6 and Athlon CPUs are hampered by awful chipsets, because the chips themselves are pretty good for the time. The K6, while not excellent gaming performers, were pretty awesome on everything else and the Athlon was a fantastic CPU all around.
I might give a P5A a try if I find one at a reasonable price someday.

Thats not quite right. Intel abandoned the S7 platform with the P233MMX. AMD did the K5 which is has a damn good performance clockwise, but came way too late and scaled not to higher clock rates (see the 133 MHz bench). So they bought NexGen and made the K6. NexGen showing it's superscalar CPU at CeBit 1993 while Intel showed their Pentium put really a shade on Intels presentation. So also K6 was late and AMD took socket 7 and said that S7 will scale much higher.
This was the low budget segment while Intel pushed their Pentium II at insane prices. Looking at the first P2 chipsets like 440LX the performance was also not superior (compared to 440BX).

From my memory K6 was a very successful story especially due to the low price. So entry level gaming system were f.e. a K6-2 300 MHz with a V3 2000 and 3Dfx did 3DNow! optimization...

Maybe also read this http://redhill.net.au/c/c-a.html

AMD was cheap but it had to be to compete with Intel. But budget people could also go for the classic Celeron-A and that was certainly better than K6-2 (or Pentium 2 for that matter!).

My fav budget chip is the Duron though. I remember people moving from K6-2 to a Duron and that was maybe one of the most impressive upgrades ever. That created a lot of AMD fans.

I'ver been using a ga5ax for years with various k6's and never had issues. Could be problems with that particular board [or the fact it's 4.1 - mine is 5.2 I think].

the thing that made K6 (and variants) performance suck compared to the PII or Celeron was poor FPU performance, which is why gaming was almost always faster with those machines... integer performance from the K6 was slightly better though

TheMAN wrote:

the thing that made K6 (and variants) performance suck compared to the PII or Celeron was poor FPU performance, which is why gaming was almost always faster with those machines... integer performance from the K6 was slightly better though

Back then, though, the price difference between a K6-2/3 and a Pentium II/III system was prohibitive so a lot of us went with the AMD chip because it was what we could afford and we put up with the bugginess of the Super 7 platform. If you're looking to build a period retro box today, there's not much reason to build a Super 7 system over a Slot1/Socket 370 system unless you want to test some specific aspect of the Super 7 platform. Even a Slot A system would be preferable in some circumstances.

I don't remember K6-3 being popular. I think AMD had some production problems with it so it was a bit late. It was more expensive as well. By then the favorite gamer chip was the Celeron A or the SL2W8 PII.

From my experience most popular was K6-233 as upgrade CPU for lower end pentium systems as P100 to P133 and then in second generation when P2 was way too expensive a K6-2 300 to 400 MHz. I still think you got more for the money at this time if you went K6-2.
The K6-3 problem was that it was too late, would have required a mainboard change in a lot of cases and Athlon was out (so also P2 prices dropped). The Athlon forced Intel to lower prices and suddenly you could get a lot more CPU power for the same money.

I think K6-3 came out about 6 months prior to Athlon. K6-3 was around starting in December '98. Athlon became somewhat available around August '99.

Ok, but release doesn't mean availability. 😉

Yeah K6-3 was not high volume and maybe never was. Then Athlon had platform issues with the poor early motherboards. K6+ also came at the end of that year. And it was the year of pushing for 1 GHz. What a year.

the K6-2 was very popular due to it's low price and 3DNow!
the K6-III came out not long before the Athlon came out, and as said, it required a lower voltage for the chip and updated BIOS support... not many boards supported it, but with the addition of on chip L2 cache, it made it competitively fast, though at that point the price was getting close to Celeron levels IIRC

TheMAN wrote:

the K6-2 was very popular due to it's low price and 3DNow!
the K6-III came out not long before the Athlon came out, and as said, it required a lower voltage for the chip and updated BIOS support... not many boards supported it, but with the addition of on chip L2 cache, it made it competitively fast, though at that point the price was getting close to Celeron levels IIRC

I think you might be mixing up the K6-III with the mobile K6+'s?
K6-III ran on the same voltages as the K6-2 (anything from 2.2v to 2.4v for the desktop variants), just fyi 😉

And the K6-III seems to be way more uncommon compared to the mobile K6's (the +'s I mean), not sure how but on Ebay the k6+'s seem to be available in very large quantities while the K6-III seems quite hard to find.
They even seemed harder to find then the last series of Cyrix ss7 chips a couple years ago (not sure how it is now though, been a while since I last checked for their availability).

For some reason I like the K6-III's though. I like the whole Socket/Super Socket 7 platform and don't think they're awful or anything. But perhaps that's also because I never had a ss7 system when it was new (I got a Pentium 2 instead).
They may have slower performance but it was interesting in a way to see how far AMD (and to a lesser extend Cyrix) could go with the outdated Socket 7 platform, creating Super Socket 7 in the process.

I guess I have
it's been many years since I messed with those chips

I have a K6-III 450 running in a 430TX board at 400mhz... it'll never be as fast as a Super7 board, but it's damned reliable at least!

Tetrium wrote:

on Ebay the k6+'s seem to be available in very large quantities while the K6-III seems quite hard to find.

AMD had trouble manufacturing K6-III. It was released late AFAIK. Probably a low volume CPU in the end.

K6+ was popular for budget notebooks and easier to build. I wouldn't be surprised if many times more of K6+ had been produced.

I remember when I bought my Compaq K6-2 system that the 533mhz model seemed to be the sweet spot as far as price/performance went. All of the major OEM's had a K6-2 533 in their lineups and they sold them as fast as they could bring them to market.

I overclocked my k6+ from 533 mhz to 600 and i feel the system is a bit unstable,so prolly needs a bit of voltage increase,in order to make the procesor work on my MB even at stock speed the manual says to set the voltage to 2.1(standard for the k6+ it's 2.0v),now if i set the voltage to 2.2 is that too much for the procesor?
I have a big titan cooler and used arctic silver 5 paste,so even at 600 mhz the radiator its just mildly warm,so overheating is not a problem.

It should be ok but you are overvolting so there are no guarantees. I've done 2.2v before with these chips.