K6-2 500mhz and my old socket 7 motherboard

[Guest]

I have a very old socket 7 motherboard with the VIA Apollo VPX chipset(a very old chipset) with a Pentinum 233 MMX.
I bought myself a K6-2 500mhz today (I wanted to buy a k6-2 400 but couldn't find any of them) and tried to use it on my motherboard. I set the CPU core voltage to 2.1V and the multipler to 2x with an FSB of 66mhz (max is 75mhz, but some of my PCI device have trouble with that speed). The motherboard detected it as an K6 400mhz but it keep rebooting itself after the memory post, therefore I can't even go into the BIOS. Can someone tell me why this is happening?
I know the BIOS doesn't support K6-2, but I heard many people got the K6-2 to work even if BIOS doesn't support it.
I also heard that not all K6-2 500mhz support a FSB speed of less than 100mhz. May that be the cause of the problem?
Btw the name of my motherboard is Octek Rhino 12+ with the VIA VT82C580VPX chipset

 

[Guest]

Have you checked the website? www.octek.com.au

 

[Guest]

I checked their web site already, it's useless
my motherboard already has the most recent BIOS

 

[Guest]

What you might be experiancing is a loop timing problem (if i remember corectly) this affects the K6 at 350MHz and above when using windows 95. Since you said you where upgrading from a 233MHz I thought you might still be using windows 95, if you are, the following URL will explain some of the things to check for and link you to the microsoft patch download site at the bottom (just hit the accept button)
http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/k623d/win95_update_k6.html

Note: this patch only works on windows 95 B or C so make sure to check before using it. That is if you are even using 95.

 

[Guest]

You might want to try fooling with teh memory timings. Try installing the p233mmx and change settings the fastest values. Then drop in the k62 and try to boot.

It's possible you've got a bad processor too. see if you can exchange it before giving up altogether.

 

[Guest]

I'm sure I don't need the Win95 patch since my comp won't even try to detect the hard disk anyway with the K6-2
however I'm actually using Win98 FE

 

[TknD]

The easy way to solve the problem:
Get a new motherboard.

I'm guessing your BIOS gets an ok check on the chip but the motherboard's chipset doesn't know how to use it (or something like that). Maybe you ought to check out VIA's website.



TknD

 

[Guest]

thx guys
I finally managed to run the K6-2 500 at 400mhz after another BIOS update (it's not really an offical BIOS update)
The BIOS even detect it as K6-2 instead of K6
but however Win98 detected it as K6
and the strange thing is, when I set the FSB to 75mhz and the clock multiplier to 2x, the comp still give me 400mhz

 

[Brent]

Well a FIC 503+ board may be your answer. I would sugest a fic pa2013 but its an ATX and dimm only board. The va503+ come with 4 sim and 2 dim and has both at/atx power conectors. I beleive you can pick one of these boards up for about 60-70$. The first revision of the 503+ had some problems that were related to processors 500mhz and above, so if you do plan on purchasing this board make sure the vendor has tested it with a K6-2 500. I beleive Tom has some old reviews and the va503+ and pa2013 both fall within the top 3 for performance of super 7 boards. If FIC does't turn your crank for a board manufacture then TYAN makes some good solid super7 boards(1592 and 1598 I believe are Tyans AT and ATX boards respectively(cant remember for sure but I beleve these are Trinity boards)).

Unfortunaly I wish I could tell ya the way to make your system work with what you have, and It does seem that if your board has the correct core voltage settings it should work. I beleive the k6-2 500 had a core of 2.2(or was that the k6-2 350) anyways, I'm not sure if a .1 core difference could affect the system to the degree you discribe.

One more thing to take into account is your time spent messing with somthing that may not work or run stable. I find that sometimes its easier to bite the bullet and purchase equipment that is tested and has reveiws on the results than to keep banging your head against a wall.
$60-75(USD) is a small price to pay for peace of mind.

Another quick note: the k6 300 and k6-2 300 was the change over from the 66mhz to the 100mhz bus. There has been noted problems with the k6-2 running at a lower than a recomended 100mhz bus speed, so you could be right that the board without the 100mhz bus support/bios could very well be the problem.

 

[Bubba]

Maybe we are all overlooking the obvious. You said the FSB is set to 66. I have a K6-2 500, I always thought it had to be set to a FSB of 100 and a multiplier of 5.
Is is wrong, can you evern run a K6-2 500 on a 66 FSB?

 

[Guest]

well I could only managed to run the k6-2 500 at 450mhz with the 75mhz FSB and 6x multiplier. It really is the max speed my motherboard can do
Although the BISO still says it's a 400mhz cpu, but I checked it using WCPUID and it says it's running at 450mhz

 

[BrianL]

I am running a k6-2/500 at 83.3*6 for over 4 months and it runs very well. There is no problem running it at less than 100 FSB. I have run it successfully at 75 and 66 as well.

To get the full benifit of the chip you may have to enable the write caches if your bios does not know exactly what it is. The fact that it returns 400 indicates that that is the last one that it knows about in its bios and those were the old 2.4V ones. The ones past 450 are 2.2V. I would strongly suggest that for stability, you run the chip at 2.2 or 2.3V and not 2.1. You may want to use a program like CPU Control Panel from Powerleap to check on the status of the all the CPU features.

 

[Guest]

ffs my hdd works fine after putting the FSB back to 66mhz

Another lesson learned - painfully

 

[BrianL]

Your IDE controller must be tied the the FSB speed and it starts getting data errors after 66Mhz. If you want to get a controller card and run you HD off that, you may be able to get around the problem and set your FSB higher to get higher performance out of your processor

 

[Guest]

What connection does those controller card uses?
PCI or what?

 

[Guest]

A standard IDE card (PCI) may help to OC your PCI bus but remember it may not be just the controller failing , anything on your PCI will be subject to the same stress..

M

one of the first UK T-Bird users....