K6-III 450... is this system just a paperweight?

[K6]

K6 still a useful CPU.


The SUN Cobalt SERVER is K6 powered

http://www.sun.com/hardware/serverappliances/qube3/index.html

 

[cbrsurfr]

I used the DFgui program (to test my speed) and made a post @ Overclockers Network (OCN) and a bunch of people replied with their times. Sorry for the late reply, I don't post here very often.

 

[Assimilator1]

The K6-3 , K6-2+ and the K6-III are powerful processor thanks to the FULL speed on die cache , compared with the HALF speed cache of PII and PIII.

Partially wrong ,the PIII coppermines have full speed cache ,only the PIII Katamais had the old 1/2 speed cache

a K6-3 is way faster than a PII or PIII CPU.

Wrong!

Well partially😉 (here we go again! :disgust: )
The K6-3's full speed cache does give it the edge over PII's in buisness benchmarks that doesn't include FPU testing ,but anything else that needs a good FPU (which the whole K6 family DOESNT have) they are seriously slower than a PII/III ,sometimes in the order of 30-40% at the same clock speed!:Q.

As for the good benchmark in Q2 ,I guess you didn't read what I posted earlier

,so I'll repeat myself😛 ,AMD developed their own patch for the K6-2/3 family combined with a Voodoo 2/3 ,this gives exceptionally good benchmarks in this game.Any other vid card & you don't get anywhere near that amount of boost from 3DNow,other games don't benefit so well either.(Here's a link from the 2nd article you mentioned showing my point). How often does the the CPU maker go that far to support extra instructions? ,not often.

Here's an excert from the 1st article you mentioned.

Around 6 months ago, AMD first introduced the K6-2 with their new 3DNow! instructions designed to improve 3D gaming performance. At the introduction, the only question that remained after seeing the 60+ fps in Quake 2 on a K6-2 333 was whether or not support for 3DNow! would really begin to appear in games. Since then, there have been numerous title releases with 3DNow! support built into the engine, and you can expect virtually every game based on the Quake 2, or Unreal engines to ship with some support for 3DNow! regardless of how minute. Unfortunately, whats becoming apparent is that most game developers dont seem to be taking 3DNow! seriously enough, which is why the K6-2 still trails the Pentium II & Celeron A in performance in some games such as Half-Life. You can expect support for 3DNow! to grow even more, however it is doubtful that 3DNow! will gain the support needed for all games to perform like the 3DNow! version of Quake 2 does on a K6-2 system.

Luckily, with the increased clock speeds of the K6-3, the gaming performance gap between AMD and Intel is closing in on itself as youll be able to tell from the gaming performance benchmarks AnandTech ran in Quake 2, which offers an excellent example of what proper 3DNow! implementation can really do on a 3DNow! capable processor, and Unreal, which demonstrates a more realistic implementation of 3DNow! from a performance perspective.


Anyway I do agree with you that the K6 is still a useful CPU 🙂 (especially the K6-3,2+ & 3+)

Bob
Sorry for hijacking you thread mate🙁 ,but there were a few points I couldn't let slip!😱
Glad to see you'll be making good use of your K6-3 rig 🙂

 

[deerslayer]

If you sell it you probably wont get much out of it, but I bet someone would buy it. A lot of people just want a computer to do office apps, email, and web browsing and that computer would work fine for those type of apps.

I would keep it and run SETI on it, but don't install ME, go with 98se 😉😀

 

[TheCorm]

I agree with Assimilator on the K6-III issue despite my original thinking....Although I do remember one of the "comparison" CPU Multimedia benchmarks in Sisoft Sandra 2002 Professional showing that in 3D Now! FPU vs PII MMX FPU the AMD K6-III came out on top....whats that about?

Corm

 

[Assimilator1]

🙂

Wasn't MMX an 'interger' instruction enhancements??

 

[TheCorm]

Sorry my mistake....here is what I meant....I took this from the Sandra 2002 Professional CPU Multimedia Benchmark:

LINK

This is showing an almost identical level in performence between the PII 400 and K6-III 450 on Integer but check out the Floating Point.....why is that?

Corm

 

[DT4K]

I had a K6-2 380 with a PCI Voodoo 3 until February of this year. Actually I still have it, but it's just used by my kids for their games. Sesame Street, Toy Story, etc. That setup will be fine on older 3D games and any more recent non-3D games. I used to play a lot of Quake 2 and Rogue Spear on it. Although Urban Operations ran a little choppy, and Q2 ran a lot smoother than Q3.

 

[Athlon4all]

Assimilator1 hits it on the head. decent system, can run Win 2000 (which is what i would go for). If you wanted a perf. boost up the HD to a 7200RPM.

 

[Assimilator1]

TheCorm
Maybe its testing the cpu's 3dnow performance? ,in which case the PII would suck cos it doesn't have it😉

Btw which part of the UK are you from? ,I'm near Guildford,Surrey

 

[BobTheWizard]

No problem, Assimilator1.... I got a LOT more mileage out of this thread than I expected. It has convinced me to keep the K6-III and see what useful things I can do with it.

Thanks for your input, as everyone else too!!


🙂


edit: BTW, as of today, it is really important for me to get it up and running again.... My job ended today, and now I'm down to using my main computer at home by itself to do the Seti WUs....

but... it's all good.....

 

[Assimilator1]

Bummer🙁 ,I hope you find a new job quickly!

 

[Jhhnn]

Yeh, it'll do most anything you want, other than intense new games. As suggested, a new 7200rpm ata100 drive on an adapter card would do wonders for the apparent quickness. The drive itself is really more important than the interface card.....

On the other hand, it's not the kind of thing worthy of much investment, maybe see what you can find used on the fs/ft forum....

 

[DeeTees]

You must be kidding? the PIII 450 was seriously faster than the K6-2/3 ,so was the Celeron of similar speed ,don't tell me I'm gonna be arguing about the 30-40% better FPU of the PII/III/Cel vs AMD K6-3/2 3+yrs since their release 😉

I can guarantee you that a K6-2 350 would suck at any decent 3D game released in the last 2yrs or so! ,I know I used to have 1!:disgust:😉[/quote]

First things first. No one was talking about K6-2 350 CPU's. The CPU in question is a K6-3 450.

Back up your claim that a 450 Celeron is seriously faster than a K6-3 450. It is just not so. You can damm the K6-3 for its real problem - it runs HOT. Seriously hot when compaired to a celeron of similar speed, but when you compair raw speed, the K6-3 was more comparable to the PII of similar speed not the celeron.

The K6-3 was a competitor of the PII which was the contemporary Intel CPU not the PIII which just proceeded the Athalon.

As to your disgust with the K6-2 350 with a 3-d game how would you feel about a modern 3-d game with a PII-350, to compare oranges with oranges?

 

[Assimilator1]

If you'd bothered ro read the post by DoubleL you will see that he did mention the K6-2!😛

Back up your claim that a 450 Celeron is seriously faster than a K6-3 450. It is just not so.

Jesus this is really old hat ,most people by now know that the FPU peformance of the K6-3 & 2 suck! ,if you had bothered to read this thread at all you would of seen my really big post with a link to an article by Anandtech showing just how poor its peformance is! (re the 2nd article) ,and theres a Celeron at 450 & a K6-3!
It is true that the k6-2/3 does better with a Voodoo card but it is still behind the PII/Cel except in Q2
As far as 3dgames go the on die L2 cache of the K6-3 only made a modest difference to gaming performance ,no where near enough to close the gap on a Celeron or a PII/PIII.
As for the Unreal test in the 1st linked article it is obvious that the game is being held back by the vid & not the cpu ,except the slowest ones.I don't know why they bothered to include that!
Re PIII vs K6-3 ,I'm not certain here but I believe the lower clocked PIII's (450,500,533,550) were being sold along side the K6-3 for a short while

but when you compair raw speed, the K6-3 was more comparable to the PII of similar speed not the celeron.
wth are you talking about?😕 ,the PII was (slightly) faster than the Celerons ,so how can it be comparable to a PII but not a Celeron?

😕

Re PII 350 ,whilst that would be too slow for many of the lastest games it would be able to handle older games far better than any K6-2/3.

Inccidently another program that graphically shows the K6-2/3's poor FPU performance is SETI ,though SETI loves a high FSB & lower latency ,it also needs a CPU with a good FPU.A K6-3 450 will do Work Units in about 18-19hrs at best ,even my mates PII 333@374 can do them in about 15hrs! ,that's running on a FSB 25MHz slower than the K6-3 & with a clock speed 76MHz lower! ,you do the maths😉

I hope that I don't have to trawl all around the net to dig up old articles further proving my point?😛.................. ok I did a very quick search & came up with this old article by THG ,its a TNT2 vs V3 review but it also includes PIII/PII/Cel vs K6-2/3.Notice how poor the K6's figures are with the TNT2 ,this is only partly down to immature 3Dnow support ,that just shows what happens when you have to relie on new instrucion sets!.

Anyway ,I'm getting bored with this very old arguement ,I hope I've made my point!

 

[BigBadBiologist]

The K6-3 is a nice little chip. I just finished putting together a little system from old junk I had laying around: a K6-3 400 (soon to be OCed with a pelt), 256meg RAM, 10 gig HD, ATI Radeon 7500, SB Live! value. It runs nicely. Not fast, but nice. It will run Q3 if a friend comes over and wants to LAN. It plays MP3's and DVDs fine. I think I'm going use it as a HTPC. The ATI TV out should be good enough and the SB live sounds good thru my stereo system. Not a bad system assembled from junk.

Oh almost forgot, AT wrote an article on this a while back here.

 

[TheCorm]

Good points by Assmimlator again....when I bought my K6-III it was either than or a Celeron 366/400mhz at the time and I went for the K6-III 450mhz and I think it performed quite well against the Celeron alternatives but it wouldn't have beaten a PII 450...with the same components.

It was another form of PR back then.....all in the names....a K6-III 450 was as fast as a PIII 450 but only when comparing to business applications....and so long as you had at least 1mb of onboard cache. Again I would say it was similar with the Cyrix M2....it was called the M2 so it could be compared with the PII and with business apps something like the M2 300 did compare quite well with the PII 300 despite running slower.....but in terms of gaming performence I would say the M2 300 was more like the Pentium MMX 166mhz...if that.

Corm

 

[redpriest_]

You know, this entire discussion is hilarious, especially when you put things into context:

CPUs needing special instruction sets to perform well (Pentium4 + SSE2), (K6+3dnow)
CPUs running seriously hot (Pentium4 3.06 GHz, K6-3)
CPUs with heat spreaders...(Pentium4, K6-3)

=)

All in good fun, but coincidence?

 

[BobTheWizard]

Originally posted by: redpriest_
You know, this entire discussion is hilarious, especially when you put things into context: CPUs needing special instruction sets to perform well (Pentium4 + SSE2), (K6+3dnow) CPUs running seriously hot (Pentium4 3.06 GHz, K6-3) CPUs with heat spreaders...(Pentium4, K6-3) =) All in good fun, but coincidence?

Yeah, this may be true. But there are over 40 posts in this thread, and there's lots of information in it. I certainly have gotten an answer or two from asking the original question.

The processor I originally asked about served me well for quite some time. I like the AMD processors. The price is always better than the Intel equivilant, and AMD keeps Intel working to improve, and vice versa, Intel keeps AMD pushing to improve. Knowing about the "CPUs needing special instruction sets to perform well" and the "CPUs running seriously hot" actually has been a good part of my learning curve.

.....least that's how my pea brain sees it.....

😀

(geez... it's late, and I sure hope that made some sense...)

 

[CheapTOFU]

I didn't have time to read what ppl had to say..
But I used to have the K6-3 in my old computer case..
I can tell you that it may not be good for gaming, but it is a good cpu for everything else..
I had seen some1 who oc'ed it to about 800 mhz..(only possible with K6-3+)
and in business bench, it was actually faster than old athlon 900 mhz..
It was the only CPU in the world to have extra L3 cache and according to ppl who oc'ed and benchmarked it, it outperforms any other CPU at the same speed except gaming..

 

[CheapTOFU]

oh~ some1 said it is hot..
true.. but I never had to use a big heatsink or fan for this cpu..
and I only used a 1200 rpm fan.. it was so quite!!
and the heatsink was so small.. about the size of my video card heatsink..