K6/2 550 at 600 and more?

[Lange666]

Hi, i recently bought a K6/2 550 to replace my k6/2 400 which was almost all his lifespan overclocked to 450. The 550 is running smooth but i'm not being able to overclock it so far. Since i've red that the K6/2 550 treats the x2 multiplier as a x6, i thought it was possible to overclock it at least to 600 on a 100Mhz FSB. I even use CPUIdle and thermal paste for extra cooling.
So far, i had no luck, i moved the core voltage up to 2.6v but it didn't boot in Win98. Always VxD or NTKern errors.
I can't go up on FSB to overclock since i'm using a Diamond Viper 550 Riva TNT and even with an extra fan, doesn't make 103Mhz.

Any idea's on what to do next to get to 600 Mhz (and beyond) ???

Thx

[Ultima]

Well Lange666,

Seems I'm the bringer of bad news now!!!

The k6-2's limit is just about 600, so.....
You would have been a lot cheaper of if ya had bought a 450 and clocked that to 550 or so...
Then you would have saved money and had alotta fun clocking it.

Pim

[Chesy]

To get to 600, you need 2.7v and after a couple of weeks you can move down to 2.6.

Burning in the processor first is probably the most important thing. I couldn't overclock over 600 , but now I have it running at 124x5=620 2.7v stable for over a month. I know sometimes this would depend on individual processor, but I think that with the correct hardware and cooling 620+ is also possible.

[Lange666]

Mmm, tried some extra stuff and also a few things you mentioned.
First, i tried to move up to 2.7v but that didn't work. No boot, no video, nothing in fact.
Then i played around a bit with the FSB. On this MB, i don't have the 103 setting anymore so i did go directly to 112 with a x5.5 multiplier which gives 616Mhz. I turned the freq. of the videocard down (soft) to be able to see what happened. It booted but got stuck at Win98 again. So i lowered the multiplier to x5 (112x5=560) and this time it worked, even with the voltage at 2.3v But 560 is not much extra and then i had to turn down the video freq to be able to get there.
Then i moved videofreq back up to normal and moved the FSB down to 95 with a x6 multiplier. This gives 570 Mhz but whatever i tried, it wouldn't boot. Everytime i try to use the x6 multiplier, it crashes.

Also, whats the fasted? A CPU at 560 instead of 550 with an FSB of 95 instaed of 100 or the other way around?

[Ultima]

Rule for k6-2's is:

The higher the FSB, the better!!!

With k6-3's it is pure Mhz's that you want, but k6-2 perform better at a higher FSB.

Pim

[akaBruno]

There is a lot of good advice above there, Bud. But, lapping my 500 is what got me to 600, at 2.8v for a burn. Also defrag after crashes and eliminate every auto-start program you can.
Watch the temps and be COOL.

Bruno

And scan the registry , after crashes!!!

[This message has been edited by akaBruno (edited 05-23-2000).]

[narayan]

620 Well done! Can you post some benchmarks?

[wtp]

it might not be the limit! -40C is one thing ::cough:: #rotor ??::cough::. Anyways, you can keep looking around at the http://www.overclockers.com database, and see what is the limit.

[Lange666]

Sh*tty stuff. Had to go back to 550Mhz.
Tried almost everything i guess.
Even went 2.8v but then the temp goes skyhigh very quickly even with thermal paste and software cooler.
Also worked with the FSB. I used 6x 95 which gave me 570 but then the FSB is not 100 and i believe that you better have an higher FSB then a slightly higher CPU-clock.
I also tried 5x112 but that wouldn't work. Or i did get slammed back into windows when playing games or the video card could not follow because of the higher AGP-bus clock!!

Still looking for some idea's!!!

[This message has been edited by socalgal (edited 05-26-2000).]

[CMonster]

Guess what I discovered - 570mhz is about the highest average stable speed for that chip ...

[Lange666]

And were did you get that info from??

[Chesy]

It depends very much on the hardware you use.

I've tried on 2 different motherboards, an Aopen Ax59pro and a Gigabyte GA-5AX rev4.

The first stable at 620, on the second can only get to 105x5.5=577.5, this is with a G-force. With a Savage 4, I cannot go over 550.

However, when I install a PCI modem I get random crashes on a 124 bus. Another thing happening is that if I use Pc100 ram instead of 133, I cannot boot into windows over 570.

[Lange666]

So it's a bus issue more than a CPU one!!
I will look into that and see if i can get me some 133Mhz Ram to try.
My board only support the 112 and 133 Mhz frequences above 100. It's a quite big step in i wanna overclock.

[Lange666]

Forgot one thing, héhé

How about the x6 multiplier? You stay with the 100Mhz bus freq. then! I tried this but it only will boot into DOS and then the temp of the CPU reaches alarming levels. I did go up to 2.8v but once at 2.8v, i don't get video anymore. The HD starts to turn but thats all. I assume that the CPU shuts itself down when the voltage is to high.

[Chesy]

2.8v is very high, try at 2.7. If you can boot your computer, but then it shuts down try cooling it further.

What mobo have you got?