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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dave Hanson who wrote (1015)	6/2/1998 10:26:00 PM
From: Dave Hanson	Respond to of 14778

Nice, newly cheap Socket 7 upgrade: K6-266 and up With the release last week of the K6-2 chip from AMD, their pricing on the K6 chips have dropped markedly. Today, I ordered a K6-266 from Mirage Computers (from Price Watch) for $103 "or less" shipped. For those who may not know, The K6-266 and K6-300 are AMD's chips that are disigned to work with most Pentium class (i.e., socket 7) motherboards. AMD maintains a compatibily list on their site, and one can easily find reports of sucess or failure using dejanews.com. If one wants to spend a little more, the K6-300s and K-2's are running about $130-$160. While these lack the extra 3-d instructions that the K6-2 will add, the performance difference is negligible for business apps, as tomshardware.com has reported. What they do have is several months of production ramp-up (albeit in modest volume) in a .25 micron fab. Because these chips are .25 micron, like the faster mobile Pentium chips and the > 300 mhz PIIs, they run much more coolly and at less power than their slower predecessors. In my case, I'm expecting a 20-30% observed system performance increase under NT from swapping this chip for my 686mx, which is running at 133 mhz (thanks to the maxtor-enforced bus speed reduction, as discussed in my earlier post,) and thus rated as roughly equivalent to a 166 Pentium MMX. At the same time, it will dissapate less heat inside the case (nice for us drive tray users.) (FWIW, Cyrix chips perform somewhat less well under NT than AMD chips, which in turn do somewhat less well under NT than PIIs and Pentium Pros.) This may be more detail than the thread is interested in, but it did strike me as an unusually good price/performance and ease of installation upgrade. If a person already has maxed out their cachable ram at 64 megs, and has a good fast hard drive, this is a nice bottleneck to tackle given the newfound CPU competition.