Don't buy one...it's dead money (AMD K6-2)

Member Name: cjkace

Product:	AMD K6-2
Date:	24/05/01 (341 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: If you already have a Super Socket 7 board then you can go up to 550Mhz

Disadvantages: It's gone as high as it can, dead board format, Duron only costs about £10 more, won't play games in six months time

Why bother writing about a processor that's almost at the end of it's shelf life? Mainly because of DooYoo. I've read a couple of opinions that seem to promote this processor and I have to ask why (if this op upsets those reviewers then I'm sorry, but this is my opinion). It's stuck in a motherboard format that is not much longer for this world, it's slow and at 550Mhz it's reached the absolute limit of it's speed. If there had been anywhere to go with the motherboard format I wouldn't have spent £500 upgrading to Socket A.

Some history about the actual processor.

My first PC was based on an AMD K6-2 3DNow 350Mhz processor which (at the time) fitted into the new generation of Socket 7 motherboards, labelled Super Socket 7, which ran on a 100Mhz front side bus and necessitated that you had PC100 memory. At the time it was slated as a Pentium II beater at half the cost. Unfortunately for AMD, it didn't live up to the reputation and was quickly relegated to the bargain bucket as far as processors were concerned. When Intel released the Celeron, it quickly became a fight between the Celeron and the K6-2, with the latter winning until Intel added on-board cache to the Celeron. This, along with it's ability to be over-clocked to the extreme lifted the Celeron back above the K6-2.

It's only competitor therefore, and the only other processor using the same format of motherboards, were the Cyrix based chips, but when Via bought the rights they moved the Cyrix to the (then) new Socket 370 format, which left AMD alone once more with the Super Socket 7 format. Unfortunately, the limitations of the chipset meant that the top speed that could be reached was 550Mhz, so AMD developed the Athlon and Duron range of processors, moving the k6-2 onto the mobile range, but even that will be dust soon as the mobile version of the Athlon will soon be released.

So why buy a K6-2? It's cheap, but for
ten pounds more you can buy a low end Duron, which at least has an upgrade path of 18 months or so. The only things in it's favour are the price of the motherboards, many of which have everything on-board (graphics, sound, modem etc) but the performance is dire. While they will run most of todays games, you won't get a very good resolution, and in six months you won't even be able to play the latest games. It also will not run at full speed on the old Socket 7 boards, as most of them are limited to a 66Mhz front side bus with only 3x multiplier.

The K6-2 was a decent processor, but unfortunately it has had it's day. Do yourself a favour, spend a little more money and buy a Duron based system.

Summary: