Let's upgrade an early Socket 7 board beyond the limit (Part 5): Showdown! 

I'm still sporting a K6-3+ at 600mhz in my GA-5AX board. Quake2 actually got a 3dnow! patch to give it a performance boost on these CPU's.

Hands down, without a doubt, THE best retro x86 channel out there. Outstanding work. Thank you so much!

Genuinely incredible work. The satisfaction on seeing those benchmark figures! love it!

Amazing series. You turned a decent early(ish) pentium board into a much more useful testbed. "Super socket 7" would allow for AGP and SDRAM, it would be interesting to see a comparison (clock for clock) with the updated boards. As an all in one test bed this board is now so much more useful and interesting. Great job.

I truly miss those days of pc gaming. It was magical

That Pentium 200 mmx was my childhood pc's cpu for a long time, with a voodoo 3 2000 ❤

Nice to see! Remember how 'powerless' we were back in the day, almost no way to know what parts would give you the most performance and what would be a bottleneck.

This was amazing to watch. Incredible how each piece of hardware added performance and seeing the end result was just crazy. Awesome job.

That K6-3/500 is a really special chip! My first build was a K6-3/400 prior to the availability of the 500 variant. I rocked with it for nearly a decade before retiring it. I had a Tyan board that supported ECC memory and even ran Corsair ECC memory with a ramdrive. Good times! I would send it to you, but it has a special place in my heart and closet and still boots!

I ran a MB like yours with 75mhz bus for many years with a p200@225mhz, never had a single problem or instability, it was really like 5 or 6 years running like that with a trident 9660, i just set the jumpers to 75mhz and never put back because never had a reason to, it just worked... true the pci ran @37.5mhz but it just worked fine even with my voodoo 1 and playing games for hours non stop, at times i would ran it with bus at 83mhz/pci 41mhz but the proc at 2.5x instead of 3x giving it 210mhz and it would also work fine for hours but everything exept the voodoo card that did not work at those speeds.... along with that one i also got a asus tx97 with a p200mmx also @225mhz rock solid, this one would not go but over than 75mhz bus. A friend of mine still have his P55T2P4 with intel HX chipset, this board we tested with a k6 3 at litle over 400mhz and bus 75mhz, unfortunetly i didn´t have my old diamond stealth (s3) that would rua at 83mhz bus anymore to test the k6 even higher at that time.

Miss tinkering on these old machines. Im a bit of a tech hoarder and I still have a lot of my old setups buried in the garage or appropriated by my kids. Don’t fancy doing what you do anymore but it’s fun to watch you do your thing.

That Никс label on P1 sure brings back memories. My dad's friend used to run a local Никс shop branch.

This has been a wild ride. I'm really impressed with your progress so far, and that of the community who have helped you along the way. Fingers crossed that you come up with even cooler results

Could you recompile Doom with MMX optimizations enabled? Since it has been reverse engineered and compiled for a billion platforms I'm guessing it could be done 🤔🤓 it would be REALLY interesting to see the difference in benchmarks, if any 🙏🏻🙏🏻 Thanks for another amazing video, I'm always looking forward to watching them

It blows me away. Genius series, genius results. Nothing more to say ❤

Great conclusion to a fascinating series.

Very good video! Entertaining and well thaught. As pcb design guy i could help you with dc_dcs. Well from year 2013 I started a new hobby: extreme overclocking. I bought single-stage-phase-change-cooling and I had -42*C at 150W cpu. Very time consuming hobby, but fun. I have done "8800 zombie mod" - cut dc-dc part of pcb and mod it like it is a adjustable power module. Now I am selling my collection, but everything older than socket A is going to be kept for future projects. So there are more of us, retro fans! Ps. Overclockers used hwbot site. Ps2. The most wanted mobos were: ga-5ax and asus p5a. The goal was 2d performance, tests like superpi, pifast, wprime, cinebench, no 3d like 3dmark, aquamark or games.

this is a great video, thanks for all your work and time.. cheers.

Quake piercing the 60FPS threshold was pretty jaw-dropping.

You really have to love that platform, I have a P55T2P4 Rev 3.1 with a K6-3+ @ 400 MHz + Voodoo 1 6MB running and it is a blast :)

You made that board go ballistic. The wizard of upgrades! IC by Necroware (ICBN) I just do really hope you'll get your due credits for your invention of your voltage regulator. Making it open-source is a humongous credits worth of kudos. PS: Sorry for my inadequate English but I hope you understand my admiration. Kind regards

This is exactly the kind of thing I would do - end up testing every configuration with every CPU just to satisfy my own curiosity. Well, you also satisfied my curiosity, sir! Thank you.

you are the gentleman of retro-computing!

That's awesome. I remember playing with Socket 7 in the early 2010s. 200mhz pentium mmx, 512mb sdram, 512kb L2 cache module, SATA PCI controller. Got stuck trying to put PCI 3D graphics on it, and I tried upgrading to AMD K6 but the voltage was too high. A lot of fun watching you take it to the next level!

always great to see another video from you this board has been absolutely maxxed out and it's good to see

I've been using Jan's modified BIOS since 2001 when I read Oldie Tuning on Tom's Hardware and upgraded my AT computer with a P55T2P4 and a K6-2+ 475 (which overclocked to 500 MHz by using the 83 MHz frontside bus). Jan has always been very helpful, and has done his BIOS magic on request for myself and a number of others I know of. I've used both the 75 and 83 MHz FSB on many Socket 7 motherboards and have had no issues with the out of spec PCI bus. Last year I picked up an old AT computer for $20.00. This was a major score for me since I really wanted a compact AT case, and they have become very rare here. It came with a PCChips M520 VX chipset motherboard, 128 megabytes of EDO RAM, a K5 PR133 (100 MHz) an extremely slow hard drive, but most importantly for the poor person who was forced to use it, no L2 cache at all! This was one of the infamous PCChips motherboards that had fake cache chips, and the COAST slot was empty. On the bright side, this rendered the VX chipset's sixty four megabyte cacheable area limit moot! I used an Evergreen Spectra voltage regulator and replaced the K6-2 400 CPU that was installed in it with a K6-3+ 400 that I slightly overclocked to 450 MHz (6x75). Combined with a fast, modern hard drive, this computer flies in comparison to how it was when I first got it. Since this board has a header for a VRM module, I plan to replace the Evergreen module one with one of yours.

I've followed this series from the beginning and it's been really fascinating. I love how much you were able to push this board. Also, I've always been curious if there was any difference in performance between MMX and non MMX pentiums in regular applications. It's cool to see that there actually was! Looking forward to see what you explore next.

very impressed by your level of proficiency for someone who claims not to be an electronics engineer, I think that you could put a few of them to shame with your resourcefulness. This is genuinely excellent work. I've gotten the bug from you so now my girlfriend wants to kill both of us because of the number of PCB boards occupying the house!😂

Excellent work! Videos like this make me wish I had held onto my old Megatrends HX83 socket 7 board and AMD K6 200Mhz CPU. I don't remember what happened to it when I replaced it with an Abit BH6 mainboard and a Celeron 300A that spent years overclocked to 464 Mhz.

Great work on pulling all these results together!

Wooow 256kB cache stick /me has now a 5950X with 8MB L2 en 32MB L3 cache, we came a long way. My first pc was a 166MMX then after some pebcacks (= new mobo's) I upgraded the cpu to a K6-3/550 :) what a time

Quake rocking 66.6fps seems really appropriate 🤘

K6-3 +'s are so pricey, what a find!

COAST modules were not usually very interchangeable with each other despite using a standardized slot, it was as if the manufacturers did not want you to be able to reuse or sell them...

From zero to hero. I wish I had back in the days this knowledge, as it was only about processor power and nothing else.

Hey, you did some great tests. That brought me back so much memories. But I've got one question: If I remember correctly from back in the days, the RAM is cached top to down, so upper memory first. If you use more memory than cachable by the chipset, the lower memory will be uncached. The i430FX should have a cachable area of 64 MByte. Thus it should run faster with only 64 MByte RAM for anything not demanding more than 64 MByte. And that is certainly true for most DOS apps and games. Greetings Peer

Such beauty from a time when I was only 4 years old.

Love this series. The days of exciting and meaningful upgrades. 👌

Just found your channel :) Very nice. I'm just getting back into old computer hardware after a break. Have to replace some plastic 30pin SIMM slots on my 386 motherboard :( lol. But found some spare slots on a 386 backplane I have that will probably never be used again due to corrosion form the battery etc.

Amazing series. Thank you for sharing your journey with us!

yeees k6-3+ I've been waiting to see it! So nostalgic, personally. First pc I ever tore down was an IBM with a k6-3!

This series is my favorite on all of RU-vid!

wow, i dont know much about hardware pre 2010 (when i got into building pcs, instead of just playing on them) but thats some amazing work.

thats one hell of an upgrade. very nice

My father have had this P/I-P55 with his minitower PC, I enjoyed so much to upgrade his flash BIOS with BP patcher... thank you lots for your titanic work, it is really needed for those beginners starting to understand this field of interest... thank you.

I've casually watched your videos over a couple of years... perhaps over a couple drinks after work... Today you blew me away with an era I don't even dabble in (I tend towards 2003-2010 stuff, I guess). It's been awhile since I saw such detailed results, such devotion to a topic. I also more than kinda love the whole creepy vibe of the intro - I run a charity haunted house for Halloween (yes, I use retro/ewaste tech in it, how did you guess?). If I ever did a tech channel (I have so thought about it, but time, man, time) - I would do it in character, like a horror movie host... I wouldn't be able to resist! I made sure my subscription button was on, with the alerts. Thanks. This was great.

Awesome stuff. One day I will have to dive into the science of matching COAST modules to mainboards. I am quite worried about creating smoke...

I had a Pentium 166-MMX when I was a child. I used that PC to take my first steps in the world of programming. Now I want to blow off the dust from my P1 PC and go back to the spring of my life. Thank you for the video.

Really cool project, very interesting how far you can push this old hardware and the vrm is genius. I wonder if those coast cache modules come in different speeds and how much that would affect the system as a whole. Also would be interesting if you could find a 512k version too see if there are any benefits or downsides to that. Keep up the great work and awesome videos!

Cache makes a difference in many cases. I remember that my K6-2 overclocked @ 600 Mhz was still slower in many things (not all) than a K6-III @ 400Mhz.

Wow that Cos module made a day and night difference, never thought i would see sutch a big jump, i wonder kf we can recreate them nowwdays as i have a asus board that could benifit from one :) PS great job on the power module , I wouldnt mind picking one up at a later date :)

I had a hunch there should be something missing from you today,thanks for the great content !

This is defenitly the fastest S7 setup you can ever dream of.

Thanks for this video and the always interesting content! I have to add something about the MMX Pentiums... they were a little more than just more cache and MMX. There was a better branch predictor, borrowed from the Pentium Pro. But that's not all! The Pentium has two pipelines, called U and V. The U pipeline could run all instructions in parallel, the V, however, could not. You carefully had to order your instructions in order to be paired on the original Pentium. This especially applied for prefixed instructions - those not available on the original 8086 - so basically several 32 bits instructions.The MMX Pentium, however, could handle more operations in the V pipeline, and hence, this, with the larger cache, and better branch predictor, have a notable impact on performance as well, as it could pair more instructions per cycle. I wasn't aware by HOW MUCH pipelined burst cache could speed up those old CPUs... have some stick lying around and surely one or two boards - need to try it ;)

Absolutely mindblowing upgrade. Nothing to add on top of it!

I love when the hardware is hacked so neatly (not like bodges everywhere for example) to make it do things beyond what was intended

Quake on K6 is not slower because of FPU alone. (Yes , it adds). But also, because it was optimalized for Pentium instructions.

Awesome video, as always! I'm still sad that I could not repair my Asus Socket 7 motherboard with a broken CPU socket. The main reason being that I could not find a broken MB with a good socket and I would not want to destroy a working MB.

during whole video my inner voice was screaming: K6-3! put K6-3 in there! and than ... BOOM :D and second thing. I remember when I was first time inspecting my socket 7 board many years ago. I was wondering what are those various slots for. and now I know :)

Was kann ich noch hinzufügen, einfach perfekte Arbeit, Grüße aus Tschechien

Wow , didn't expect so big differance between K6-3+ Asynch cache, and PB cache. K6-3+ has internal L2 cache, which is very fast and ticks at processors speed, so in this case 400mhz. L2 cache from motherboard become L3 cache, and it's used only sporadicaly, when CPU runs out of L2 cache. Seems Quake can take all CPU cache and still need more. Incredible.

That box of boards looks like a mother lode. I look forward to more very interesting videos from you in the near future.

A pipeline burst cache... I totally forgot about that. It had a HUGE impact. I went for a Pentium 90 instead of the P100 an invested the money into PB cache instead. This was a great decision as my home-built P90 wiped the floor with the Compaq P120 that we used in the office. Too sad you didn't try the FSB upgrade. I totally understand the reason of course, but it would have been really interesting. Sure, not 100Mhz, that will most likely not work, but maybe 75Mhz. At least on later motherboards a moderate overclocking of the FSB to 75MHz was always stable. I also never had a PCI card that didn't work with 75Mhz. It would be interesting, if this works for the FX chipset too. Then you would get the AMD chip to 450MHz and see the impact of FSB increase.

Must be over 25 years ago but I remember those older Asus boards with the media bus slot at the end of one of the pci slots, the p55t2p4 with the right revision I think rev 3 and above would overclock and run a bus speed of 83mhz just by setting jumpers on the board- and was the fastest board out there at the time - it was posted on Toms Hardware about 25-27 years ago but your running with a fixed clock divider! I remember it well as I bought the board for that reason, andran mine at 83Mhz up until the p2 came out without issues after I got it settled down, from memory I only run intel CPU's in the board, I had a sb16, a GUS Max and a diamond stealth 64 (S3 chipset) with an NE2000 compatible nic, all seemed to behave ok in it at that speed, I wrote a simple multi-config DOS menu that i used to assign irq and dma to the sound and scsi,I used a multi config to change settings by menu selection at boot time as needed , there were cards that didnt like the high bus speed like the AWE32 would sound wierd and I did have to swap out the 1542 adaptec scsi card for a PCI NCR one as the adaptec didnt like the overclock neither did the advansys or buslogic cards behave at overclock - great stuff it brings back great memories and always look forward to viewing your channel what you post thankyou

Great video! Thanks! The SETMUL utility can change multiplier for AMD K6-III Plus "on the fly". On fsb = 66MHz the CPU may operate from 133MHz to 400MHz with 33MHz steps! Very awesome!

DUDE that is awesome! i found my way here as i have been pondering how to get my pb multimedia s606 to work with a k6

Very nice benchmarking and comparison! I ought to do similar with my Socket 7/Voodoo 1 test box. It's currently running a K6-266 because that's what was in it.

I liked this series of videos so much! 😊 The idea of getting a piece of hardware, a motherboard, to work in a way which it only ever had the potential to do is really appealing to me. I really love the idea of extracting the most from the options of a motherboard. I commented in the past about SMPS running at an higher frequency than the current design. Now it's probably not that interesting since the VRM seems to do its job quite well but I've done some research and there are a couple of ICs which could be used. One is the OnSemi NCP3020B (version -B for 600MHz switching frequency) in SOIC-8 package for which there is an evaluation board, NCP3020BGEVB. Schematics, bill of material, gerber files are available. Unfortunately the board is not in stock at any of the usual distributors so I'm not sure whether it has been discontinued. An alternative controller is TI LM2745/8 (adjustable from 50 kHz to 1 MHz) in TSSOP-14 package. It's slightly trickier to hand-solder and more expensive. It features a Power-Good open-drain output. The evaluation module, LM2745-19AEVAL, is in stock at Digi-Key in the UK for £75.372 including VAT.

Thank you! The only missing CPU in this test IMHO tillamook - as I remember its overclockable till 400MHz, so its interesting can it compete k6-iii+ on this clock.

Another high quality video

Thanks! Very interesting and... nostalgic )

Amazing! Waiting for the next step and the next improvement! You are great man!

COAST has to be one of my favorite acronyms 🙂

Excellent benchmarks

Back in the day I would spend so much time tweaking the BIOS and other settings to get a few more FPS, but right now I would be happy to just modify the clock module to get the battery working and the voodoo card working. I have almost the same motherboard (PI55T2P2), my CPU is Intel 133MHz. My oldest HDD booted up just fine with Windows 95 (WD Caviar 2340 - Aug 94), my second oldest drive is dead (Caviar 31600 - Jan 96). It makes very low clicking sounds so maybe put it in the freezer would work... Very melancholic to go through your old hardware and kinda emotional to see it boot up after so may years in storage. It's funny but when you pack away your stuff you don't care because you just bought a brand new computer to replace it. But then when you come back 30 years later it hits different. It doesn't quite feel like 30 years. Must be some kinda time dilation going on, the dead CMOS battery inside the sealed clock module could explain some of it; mentally I'm the same age the day that battery died 😂

75MHz bus was some stable overclocking everytime I tried it :)

It would be cool to see more comparsions if you’re able to test with boards that can utilize higher fsb just to see what performance difference it gives

Great job!

wonderful work. so happy you are exploring these old parts.

k6-3+ wow thats like a $200 chip!

The sockets on the onboard asynchro-sram seem to be longer than the chips installed. Is there a possibility to take this up to 512KB and use it for level-3 cache with the AMD K3-500 ? Perhaps with yet another mod on the bios ? And what about the Pipeline Burst ? Any 512KB availablity there ?

66MHz FSB bottlenecked all CPU's starting from around 166MHz, and that bottleneck became even worse after 200MHz. MMX-Pentium's bigger L1-caches helped a little, but underlying slow 66MHz FSB and 33MHz PCI-bus strangled the whole system. I ran 350MHz K6-2 as 336/112 because it was almost as fast as 400/100. But ran cooler with stock voltages. Slightly higher PCI-bus (112/3=37.3MHz) helped too. Practically all PCI-cards I used (Matrox/Voodoo1/3Com NICs) worked with 37.3/37.5MHz PCI-speeds, sadly many began to fail with 41.5MHz PCI-bus (83MHz FSB).

Great series! Amazing to see the effect of the COAST module

Amazing stuff! I found your channel just searching for projects to build on pcbway. Ended up ordering the silly sound bastard boards to build :)

This Pentium 166 from Russia. There is an Label "ТК НИКС" - that is an big computer shop in Moscow. Exists must be for 25 years or more.

The 512k COAST module gives a further performance boost. Probably a decade ago now, I tested the difference between a 256k and 512k COAST module on a P200 MMX, and there was a 5-7% performance improvement in Quake. There's supposedly a rare 1 MB COAST module, but I never seemed to be able to find one.

Awesome!

Amazing job!

lol i remember these dancing intel guys ad ^^

I asked a computer expert about that slot back in day and they said it works great but its almost impossible to find module.

Feel free if you happen too own one put in a voodoo 2 into the system as a 3d gpu & benchmark a few glide games. Quake 2, Unreal should have timedemos or you can make your own ones which will make for very consistent testing with that in mind. Like for example in Quake 2 you write in the console " timedemo 1 " too have the game remove the fps cap & max out the game speed so it's a shorter burst of a demo. & " map demo1.dm2 " for example. And yeah nice too see and confirm that any motherboard cache becomes essentially level 3 cache for the k6 processors with built in level 2 cache like the normally only mobile k6-2+ which i happen too have here, half the L2 cache of the k6-3 but very close in performance too the k6-3 cpus still & thanks too being mobile processors usually a bit more efficient then their desktop counterpart too cool down. Depending on what motherboard you had back in the day jumping from like a pentium mmx 166 mhz overclocked too 200 mhz, too that coast module & k6-3 at 400 mhz or if your motherboard & video card could handle like a 75 mhz bus speed overclock, you were set for a while on the cheap for sure. Fairly certain the 3dfx voodoo cards aren't super sensitive too overclocked pci bus speeds btw so 75 mhz should be ok being 9/8ths of pci bus basically speed wise if you don't have a clockspeed divider in the bios too toggle. For the 2D card the later the better basically for general stability as well if you want too do any fsb overclocking.

YUS! Been waiting for this one!

Unbelievable. God damn, man, you're good :D

a k6-III was able to work on this socket 7 motherboard??! 😱 Wow...I never knew the potential this motherboard was capable of having. Fantastic series this was. My concern though is the build itself. Can it be put to the test with voodoo 2 (sli or not)? What atx power supply is recommended on socket 7 motherboard btw?

I have the UMC burst pipe module in my m520 and it works without any issues. So I think that might be a bad module. I could test it in my PCchips m520 or if you have one you might want to try it there. Oh the m520 also has a VRM socket.

Impressive results!

Fun fact: you can actually mod any K6-II, II+, III, or III+ so you can switch them from a K6-II up to a K6-III+

I kind of remember a 75 MHz and 83MHz FSB. They could get a K6-2 to run at 450MHz and 498MHz. Some graphics cards base on a AGP 66MHz could run at PCI clock at 66MHz like the Bondi Blue PCI Power Macs. I think they were ATi Rage cards.

Fantastic rundown sir. I'd love to see if you could put that 64bit PCI slot to use.

I still have some Athlon XP. Some are AQUCA. I managed to push some of my procie up to 2500 MHz on some DFI mobo. Run SuperPi Test. What a fun it was 😂😂😂