(Relatively) Cheap Thrills: AMD K6-III+ CPU Upgrade

[Jerry McBride]

On Wednesday 10 March 2004 01:47 pm, Leon Goldstein wrote:
> I have a Compaq Presario 5151 with an AMD K6-2 350 mHz.
> I used this little desktop tower for over three years with Libranet
> 1.9.1.  With newer releases using KDE 3.x, performance was very
> demanding of patience:  KDE 3.1 took almost a minute to load.  I have
> 256 MB of RAM onboard.
>
> So, I decided to take a chance with an upgrade to a K6-III.  I bought a
> K6-III+ 450 mHz CPU from
> http://www.upgradeability.com/K6plus/index.htm?source=AdWords1
> after detailed correspondence with the owner.
>
> The K6-III+ has some instructions that make it almost the equivalent of a
> slow Duron.
>
> I installed the K6-III+ and it works very nicely indeed.  KDE 3.1
> (Libranet 2.8.1) now loads in about 23 seconds - a bit sluggish by
> contemporary standards but acceptable.  The system reports a K6-III with
> 256 kb cache memory.  The big onboard L2 cache is the main reason this
> CPU performs so well.  I am using the original passive heatsink at the
> moment, and there is no overheating problem so far.  The K6-III+ uses a
> 2.0 V core voltage vice the original 2.2 V.  I may try overclocking when
> I modify a short heatsink/fan for updraft.  On the Presario the heatsink
> abutts the power supply, and a shroud ducts air from the heatsink into
> the PS vents.  There is little clearance between the CPU and the PS, so
> a short heatsink/fan is needed.  Also, because typical heatsink fans
> blow downwards, I would probably have an airflow problem that might
> cause the PS to overheat.  (Perenthetic question:  if heat rises, why do
> heartsink fans blow air
> downwards?)
>
> I obtained a heavy copper heatsink/fan from the same source (Evercool)
> and I need to fabricate a gasket in order to reverse the fan so its hub
> has some clearance from the top of the fins.
>
> If anyone has an old Compaq laptop with a K6-2 CPU, this looks
> like a relatively inexpensive way to get a substantial performance
> boost...

I've done more k6-2 to k6-3+ upgrades on Compaq laptops than most people would 
ever dream of. Yes, it's a nice way to breathe life into an other wislowwork 
horse. The models I've worked on were all 217x series... Compaq even still 
has the bios upgrades that that allow the motherboards to correctly identify 
the new processor and it's new resources... 

All in all, quite amazing! 

Cheers.

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