Performance and Price!
Written: May 03 '00 (Updated May 09 '00)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Everything!
Cons: You Got To Be Joking!
|
|
|
| radio1_mike's Full Review: K6-2, 500 MHz (MPN-AMD-K-2/500BOX) Processor |
AMD is great! Throw off the shackles of Intel! Get yourself a K6-2, K6-3 or a Althon. You won't be sorry.
If you have read any of my other reviews, price vs. performance is always something I try to address.
When I got into the IBM PC format a few years back; I started with a P90, then a Cyrix 200MMX and then a Cyrix300M2. Last November, I purchased a K6-2 350 3D Now! CPU. It ran wonderfully. I bought it for $50. It was great, it's now in my mother-in-law's computer. I built it for her.
In March, I picked up a K6-2 500 3D Now! CPU. It's awesome. It runs fast and more importantly it runs cool. It's made on a smaller die size, which means, essentially: smaller=less heat. Heat is the death of CPUs, especially if you like to overclock your CPU. Buy a quality CPU fan, get some thermal transfer compound from Radio Shack and go to town! Drop in another cooler fan for your motherboard and you'll be set.
I have a 32MB Riva TNT2 card and 128 MB RAM, with the the 500Mhz CPU I can run Quake3 and Unreal Tournament flawlessly. All for $50-$100 less than a comparable P2 or Celeron.
The one minor problem, is the FPU is slower than Intel's. The FPU (Floating Processor Unit) is the part of the CPU (Central Processing Unit) that performs all the complicated mathematics that your computer needs to run. But AMD helps this problem, by a better pipeline setup and a larger memory cache on the chip. In my experience, I really have not seen a difference in performance in comparable Intel systems. The only time I see a difference is if I run a FPU Benchmark program. Gee whiz.
Some people prefer the K6-3 now, versus the K6-2. The is not unsupported, the K6-3 is simply a faster chip. But, it is not optimized for game playing or intense graphics, whereas the K6-2 is. The K6-3 really excels at business graphics and applications like MS Excel and the like.
But I would not hesitate to buy a K6-3. It's just that a comparable K6-2 costs about $20 less than it's K6-3 stablemate! This is why I chose the K6-2 the second time around.
Tips:
1. Don't install a new chip, unless you know what you are doing; or if your present CPU still works.
2. Cool. Cool. Cool. Add fans and thermal transfer compound. The K6-2 runs cool. But proper cooling will: ensure the life of your CPU and your other components and increase system stability.
3. Make sure to have the proper settings in BIOS for your CPU. It'll run better and you won't have any problems.
Good Luck!
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
radio1_mike
|
|
Member: Mike Farris
Location: Malden, MA
Reviews written: 48
Trusted by: 16 members
About Me:
Still here, can only write reviews infrequently.
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.