K62 500mhz too slow for even basic computing?

[BentValve]

Just wondering how slow these old K62 500mhz were.. the slowest thing I have personally owned was a Celeron 433mhz PC which at the time it seemed fast enough at the time. I played Half-Life on it with no problems.

A friend of mine brought over a K62 500mhz PC my HP , its unreal how clean it is..it looks as if its been used for a few hours tops, the CPU fan has just a slight bit of dust on it but thats it. It needs and HDD.

 

[rogue1979]

It should be just fine for desktop computing.

 

[TheStu]

Originally posted by: rogue1979
It should be just fine for desktop computing.

 

[VirtualLarry]

A K6-2 500Mhz should be just fine for basic DVD playback, web browsing, and playing Unreal Tournament (I recommend a V3 3000 AGP 16MB card to complement it with. UT ran really sweet on that thing back in the day.) Just make sure to bump up the RAM to 256MB if you can, that makes a big difference on those older machines.

 

[mindwreck]

it should fine. put in at least 256MB of ram like virtuallarry said

 

[crazyjeeper]

I had a K62 350 back in the day.
Played Q2 like a mad man too. LOL.

Like everyone said, give it a good amount of ram and a good vid card, and it should be fine for general stuff. Should be able to burn CDs on it with a good burner too.

Great for someone who doesn't need crazy power for gaming and all that stuff.

 

[staeiou]

We have 120 employees running 333mhz P2's with 64mb of ram. They're fine using Windows 98, office xp, and MSIE. Of course, they have to be defragged, scandisked, and anti-spywared at least once a week.

If you run damnsmall linux, you can use even lesser hardware for simple internet/office stuff.

 

[Bateluer]

It'll be fine for the basics.

FYI, Newegg still sells K62-500s for 14 dollars.

 

[sandorski]

Fine for "Basic" computing(depending on what's efined as "Basic"). A faster system will do the Basics faster though, but overall there won't be any problems.

Just note that there are limitations on how much RAM should be used with systems of that era. 256mb was the limit for most, but some were better off with 128mb(those with 512kb Motherboard L2 cache). L2 Cache for those CPU's was on the Motherboard, not the CPU.

 

[lithium726]

i still got a k6-2 500 runnin with 392mb pc100, and it is just fine for regular computing and older gaming with the gf2mx i got in it. its a fine machine, and itll do any office/ work task i want it too (besides maybe heavy photo editing )

 

[11427]

Me too,... my K6-2/500 is OC'd to 550 with 192 mb pc100 and an old ATI Radeon 32mb PCI video card. It has been chuggin' along 24-7 for the last 6 years (it's a Seti cruncher). It works just fine for most computing jobs,...

 

[MustangSVT]

depends on os and your tolerance.

 

[FlameDeer]

K6-2 500 still powerful enough for daily word processing, movie playback, internet browsing and even normal gaming.

 

[bluemax]

We're getting by right now on even LESS!

P3-550 that fails at full speed... running underclocked at ~400MHz and my wife can run all the MS-apps needed for her to do the church bulletin - albeit a tiny bit sluggish at times.

Can't wait to upgrade, but we sold pretty much everything to try and pay the bills.
The house is on the block in January. We'll get her a computer then.

 

[FrustratedUser]

Just throw a bunch of memory in it and it will run W2K or even XP just fine.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Btw, if you build a heatsink out of tin, in the shape of a bowl, and set the voltage to ~3.0v, and clock it up to 500-550Mhz, you can cook eggs on that proc. No joke!

Also, if you have a newer K6-2 with a "CXT" core, or newer, and the Socket7 board's BIOS is older, you might not be seeing full performance out of it. Look for a "K6-2 tweak util", it allows you to set the MTRRs and enable write-combining. That can speed up some applications such as DVD viewing.

 

[Geomagick]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Btw, if you build a heatsink out of tin, in the shape of a bowl, and set the voltage to ~3.0v, and clock it up to 500-550Mhz, you can cook eggs on that proc. No joke!

Got a video of someone doing that?
Would love to see it in real life. I chucked out all my old socket 7 stuff a couple of months ago otherwise I would've given it a go.

 

[morkys]

Dad has a K6 III 400 and its quite good. PC100 isn't the fastest and even with 256 MB, this board only caches 128MB. Still, its fairly fast and quite crash free. I hesitate to upgrade him to socket A.

 

[drifter106]

last weekend I just built my first computer (windchester 3500). Prior to this build I have been using a k62 350 for the last 5 years. Its like an 8 cylinder vs a 4 cylinder. The k62 would burn cd's and play a few games, surf and handle word documents just fine.

will keep the old one for the kids to work on and surf. I wonder what will be the "killing" factor for this ole thing. Am going to reformat the OS (2000 pro) over Xmas break...is getting very slugish. Bigtime hit when I went from 64 to 194 memory.

Should handle basic computing just fine.

 

[BentValve]

Thanks guys, just an update.

My friend gave me the K62 500mhz PC, I bought a Seagate 40gb 7200rpm HDD for it for $65 so my cost is that.

BTW it had 192mb of ram , not 120mb like I first though so I will leave it at that. Windows XP is installing now and boy is it slow going!

Oh well , I just sold my back-up PC so this should fit that slot well enough.

It sure is a cute little ah heck ..

its just like this one...

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISA...=1&ssPageName=WDVW

 

[Marsumane]

Well for some comparison, my gf's computer is a 450mhz P2 w/ 400 some megs of ram (256,128,32) and a geforce 3 ti200. It runs COD and wc3 around 30fps avg. It is also a print server and is around as fast on the net as my 2222ghz axp. Its quite amazing what these old things can actually do. I reccomend putting as much ram as u have lying around into the machine, putting a decent graphics card in it, and if u find enough ram, windows xp (with fancy visuals disabled) or windows 2000.

 

[Fingers]

A lot of the members of some of the distributed computing teams here keep those around just to run the clients on them. Also it doesn't hurt to have an extra web browser laying around if nothing else.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
Btw, if you build a heatsink out of tin, in the shape of a bowl, and set the voltage to ~3.0v, and clock it up to 500-550Mhz, you can cook eggs on that proc. No joke!

I recall seeing that posted on a web site. IIRC they used sheet aluminum and a Tbird Athlon.

Just throw a bunch of memory in it and it will run W2K or even XP just fine.

I just got a SP2 disc free from Microsoft and it said requirements for XP with SP2 was something like 64MB RAM and 200 or 233MHz.

 

[Zebo]

I never heard of it. How fast is it compared to pentium 2's? That's what I had back then and still think a p2 450 is perfectly fine for everything but power users and gamers.

 

[Tiamat]

At work, i use a Pentium 450mhz with 256megs of PC100 ram. It does so much better at typical office applications than the Pentium 300mhz with 196megs of PC100 ram did. Then again, Im also using Win2K rather than NT4.