amd k6-2 333 upgrade to k6-3 400? - Tech Support Forums

jxcheng · January 15th, 2003, 04:44 PM

I have an old HP pavilion 6350, which comes with a k6-2 333 processor and 128M memory.
It is a little bit slow now.
Does it worth to upgrade to a K6-3 400?
( A k6-3 400 would cost around $30 -35 on ebay. )
How much performance increase can I gain from the upgrade?
I use it mainly for Office applications, email and web surfing.

BTW, the motherbard is a modified version of Asus SPax97-xv, which has onboard video (4 MB maximum) and audio.

Thank you!

Jim

DanU · January 15th, 2003, 07:09 PM

The K6-3 400 will provide a nice boost over your K6-2 333. I upgraded several K6-2 machines to the K6-2+ (similar to the K6-3 but with half as much L2 and lower voltage) and IMO it was worth the $35 I payed for each K6-2+.

jxcheng · January 15th, 2003, 07:15 PM

Thank you for your reply.
Do I need a Powerleap PL-K6-III Adapter to install the k6-3 400 on my motherboard?
If so, I would not upgrade.

Richard Cranium · January 15th, 2003, 07:34 PM

I also have a HP 6350.

Your main problem is a very slow Hard Drive, the Quantum Bigfoot drive is about the slowest drive I've ever seen.
I suggest updating the HD "maybe"..

For the money invested in a total update to your HP, you could build a pretty hot machine.

The main issue with the 6350 is the Asus motherboard they made for HP called the "Puma"
This board is inherently unstable and unable to deliver performance that some lesser machines can.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but both you and I have some real slugs with the 6350.

The 6350 will probably not support the K6-3 processor properly.

I suggest leaving it alone except for trimming out the startup programs in MSCONFIG, bumping the RAM up to 128mb+ and using a 5400rpm hard drive.

I ran mine at 75mhz FSB for a while but the SIS chipset balked terribly, our resident expert on this board, PeterM, had some suggestions about this unit until he saw what chipset ASUS had stuck on it, then he suggested not fooling much with the machine.

If you decide to build a cheap-o unit that will fly, let us know. For about $300 or so you can get a pretty fast machine.

jxcheng · January 15th, 2003, 08:06 PM

Richard , thank you very much for your valuable suggestions.
I think that I will stay with my HP Pavilion 6350 for a while, save some money, and build a new cheap system later.

jxcheng · January 16th, 2003, 02:46 PM

Richard,
have you ever tried to overclock the k6-2-333 to 366 on HP Pavilion 6350?

I successfully overclocked. But I do not know how stable it is and how much performace gain I can get, so I just switch back to 333.

DanU · January 16th, 2003, 05:33 PM

Come to think of it... I did try a K6-2+ in one of the ASUS/HP SPAX-M mobos. Like Doc, I found that the SIS5598 did not like running at 75MHz at all. I suspect that the on-board video was the culprit, but didn't get to test this theory with an separate video card.

Also, the board would not boot with the K6-2+ above 333MHz, but you can get around this by booting at 333 and then using the utility K6CLK to increase the speed to 400MHz.

A super-cheap upgrade that I highly recommend is to use a separate video card. The on-board video steals 4MB of system memory AND puts a burden on the system memory bus, a double whammy. A cheap 4 or 8MB PCI video card can be had for a few dollars and will speed up the system overall.