Super7Dude wrote:hey larrystotler
Welcome to K6Plus!! Nice to read from a new face! I have also wondered about Linux... don't know too much about it though but i have a few live CDs.
Glad to have found this place. I've been dabbling in it for about 8 years. It's very stable, and it's a whole lot easier to install these days then it was back then. Of course, not having a high speed connection during most of that was a pain. Of course, there are lots of advantages: No viruses, no spyware, very few system crashes, excellent hardware support, especially for older stuff.
Super7Dude wrote:I have found a K6-III+ 450APZ (1.7v core) that reaches 533MHz at stock voltage. but it can't reach 600MHz stable even at 2.2v
I also managed to find another GA-5SMM in my box of old parts
Maybe it can reach 133 stable as well.. It has black PS/2 ports rather than the purple and green ones on my current rev1.2 board.
I've had good success overclocking over the years. Haven't lost a chip to it yet. I've got a Celeron Mobile 2.2 running at 2.93Ghz. This was my first real heavy K6 type overclock. I just never had any. I did manage to get another GA-5SMM board from another compaq. Now I just need to flash the BIOS to the Gigabyte, and hope for the best. Then grab ne of those k6-2+'s and go to town.
I know you guys have done a lot of benchmarking, but I still feel that front side bus speed with a lower multiplier is much better than a high mulitpler and lower FSB. Case in point:
I have a Dell Precision Workstation 450 with 1 2.67Ghz P4 Xeon, 533Mhz FSB. My friend has a Dell Precision 470 with 2 2.8Ghz P4 Xeon 64bit, 800Mhz fsb. We've done some testing, and my system(even 133Mhz slower) is about 33% slower than his at video re-encoding. His chips have 1MB L2 and mine has 512k L2. Another guy has an Athlon64 3000+ overclocked from 1.8Ghz to 2.3Ghz, memory overclocked from 400Mhz to 426Mhz. His system is about 25% faster than the 2.8. However, the Xeons have the advantage with the Hyperthreading were we can run 2 encodings at the same time while his can't(or I can run something multi-threaded like x264). So, mine ends up being about 25% faster than the Athlon64 because of that advantage. So, it really comes down to what you intend to do with your system. For the $125 I have in my system, I could have gotten something close to the Athlon64, but my system is better for me because of the hyperthreading. Also, I can add another chip later and double my performance whereas the Athlon64 is stuck at 1 cpu. Of course I have to have enough work for it to do as well. Keep in mind that I have no graphical desktop on my system as well, so I can't even test anything like that.
Edit: Upon finishing the Hyperthreading testing, I found out that my slower FSB hurts my results more than previously expected. I get about 20% increase in frame rates using hyperthreading, not 100% like testing on the 2.8 system with the 800Mhz fsb showed. So, once again, FSB matters more in this instance than processor speed. Expandability wins out over the Athlon64 since I can go dual core.
It's really too bad that the K6 chips didn't support SMP......