Kingston TurboChip 200 - AMD K6 MMX 200 MHz processor

Advantages: FAST, brilliant 3D, New life into old PC
Disadvantages: Discontinued and scarce. Hope K6-2plus appears soon. Dearer than K6-2

...My son has a Socket 7 PC, built by yours truly (he added modestly) originally he had a Cyric PR200 in a Tyan Trinity S1590 motherboard. He was moaning that it wasn`t quick enough to run his Amiga Emulator and play SimCity3000. I eventually relented and after a lot of difficulty bought the AMD K6-3 450MHz. The chip has 256K on-board L2 cache on top of the 64K L1 cache and this promised a VERY quick processor, the cache on the motherboard now becoming L3. This chip has been DISCONTINUED although I understand thet it is to be reborn, rebranded and resurrected at the K6-2plus, go figure. This may have something to do with AMD making an on-die cache version of the Athlon. The K6-3 absolutely FLIES in a decent motherboard such as the Tyan and issss SIGNIFICANTLY FASTER than the Pentium 2 450 by a factor of about 15%. So much for socket 7... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average off topic

Advantages: Cheaper, more enhancements,
Disadvantages: None

...Pentium 4 or AMD? The answer,in my opinion, is always going to be AMD. Firstly they cost a lot less than their pentium equivalents, costing from £10-£200 pound less. AMD incoperates both its own "3dnow" processor enhancement and Pentiums MMX enhancement whereas pentium only include MMX. Sure you have heard about the new proccessor enhancements used by the Pentium 4 but the truth is that software programmers have only really got to grips with pentiums last effort. The enhancements will do no good if no programs supports them. I used to have a pentium processor but found the cost of replacing them when they were too slow was too much. I thought it could do me no harm to try an AMD and have been hooked ever since. I own only a 700MHZ processor and can play all the games I want at all the resolutions I want. All I can say to you out... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Cheap, powerful, fast, easily overclockable
Disadvantages: Not as fast as the Athlon, no manual with my processor

...AMD have been making processors for almost as long as the regarded 'champion', Intel. Although there early 486 processors where popular, the performance lacked and never really compared to the Intel i486. This trend of being slightly 'behind' the forefront of processor technology continued into the early years of the Pentium. However, this all changed when AMD released the K6-2 and K6-3 series of processors as direct competition with the PII and PIII. Although the K6-2 450 was not the fastest AMD processor available when I purchased, it was the best when considering power-per-pound. At only £49, for a fully functioning 450MHz processor with 3D NOW instruction set, this was an excellent buy. My first impressions when seeing the benchmarks between my old system (200MHz) and the new one were pleased, very pleased. The index had... Read review

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