Let's not ruin a good thing here.

[Jethro]

Mine was a Tyan with 1mb cache on board. I think I had a k6-3? 400 OC to 450 via fsb. My tribes ran awesome, I was hooked. Started overlooking video cards soon after and havent stopped since. TNT1 anyone?

[i found nemo]

i had a k6-2 550 @ 570. it would never go to 600mhz. not sure if it was a ram issue or cpu, but 570 was rock stable. mobo was alladin mvp5 or something like that, with a nvidia tnt core gpu... i did not game much then :p the ram was kingston valu ram 128mb with a brand new 40gb hdd. but that was in 99' so it was pretty slow lol.

but my first experience with o/cing was my p1 133mhz @ 166mhz, so then i got a 200mhz p1 @ 250mhz on an asus tx97-e. highest i ever got the fsb was 112 but it was not listed on the mobo how to put the jumpers in that selected, so i think it was an unstable reading by cpu-z. that was 97'-98'

[Kobaltrock]

With the paper launch of their new GPUs, it became obvious that there will be no crossfire connector, and instead use the PCIe bus.

Now, since AMD doesn't even have a chipset that can support PCIe 3.x, the question is why not ?
Yeah, I know the CPU needs to support it as well, but, AFAIK, it isn't even on their roadmap.

It has been almost 4 years (maybe more?) without a decent refresh from them.
They need more native USB 3 ports, and 2 more SATA ports, and support for 3 full speed PCIe 3.x. lanes, then, at least, they can get some more people using AMD gear again.

The only way to get PCIe 3.x on AMD platform is from a bridge chip, which is sad.

[NEOAethyr]

I should have a delidded k6 in the closet, not sure if it was the k6-2 or k6-3.
Or maybe it was the + ver I forget now.
Never tested it though.

As for chipsets back in those days, I can't remember which was my fav.
All I do remember is that the ali chips sucked, or at least I had thought, and then I managed to get ahold of a sis chipset, which had it's own probs if I'm remembering right.
Pretty sure the sis chipset was faster overall though.

I'm pretty sure I've got the cpu still, my binned mem for that platform I probably don't have anymore, I think I sold those with a system, of course I never got paid for it, I never get paid when I sell systems lol, I always get ripped off lol , its kinda funny to the point I just don't sell complete systems anymore because of that happening so much.

Fav card was definitely the tnt1.
My uncle gave me enough money to get one for christmas, that was so awesome.
He's like here, go get your son a new vga card (he was talking to my mom).
And we went to best buy and bought one, didn't have tv out though but the card was so bad @ss.
Clock to it's absolute max too, 255mhz core.
All it needed was a simple 80mm fan blowing on it.

I didn't have that card on my k6-2 350 in the past (pair with the ali chipset, this wasn't the delidded one, this was along time ago).
I had it on my p166, ibm aptiva.
That card was enough to play any game out there at the time even with the crap cpu and edo simm ram.

I used to overclock that board to 180mhz.
Acidently overclocked the 486 too back in the day, that was my 1st experience with overclocking.
Broke a pin off, gain 16mhz .
While others played hacky sack and smoked down at the beach, I sat at home playing doom2 and played hacky sack with 486 cpu's.
If you wanna know why?, well I thought the cpu went bad, so I played with it, sometimes later went to put it in after the other cpu started messing up and broke a pin off bending them straight (I stepped on it several times by accident).
Put it back in, no longer 50 mhz, it's now 66 .
Sweet I thought, now the sx2 is on par with the dx2 kinda lol.
Never did have one of those dx3 thunderbirds though.

Back then it was ibm and only ibm.
The 1st range of aptivas were ok, but when they started selling amd's with ali chipsets and ali boards they turned to crap.
Board was horrible.
Cpu performance lacked a bit too compared to the celerons back then.

Furthest I overclocked mine was from 350mhz to 450mhz, stock itty bitty cooler, 40mm fan.
Wasn't stable, 400mhz was stable though.
But I was stuck with that rage pro onboard crap.

What happened there I had to trade my vga card for a 1.5gig drive, since at point I got curious about hardrives and started taking them apart.
You can only do that so many times before you kill sector 0.
My mom never knew, I was stuck using a 486 again until I got a new drive.
Traded my buddy my tnt1 for it.

In the end I tried getting it back maybe 2 years after.
I knew it was in his closet but he wouldn't trade back, eventually he told me he gave it away.
That sucked, that was a nice card.
Pci, not agp.
Had vesa 4.0 as well, very handy stuff.
I eventually got a radeon 7500 or 7200 I forget, I would of traded it for the tnt1 in a heartbeat.

One day I over a cousins and he had a cheapo tnt2, it only clocked to around 240mhz.
Which I thought odd but at least it clock high, just not to its theoretical max (0xff).


Anyways you can delid those k6-2s and 3's.
They also used a ceramic wafer or whatever, they a little heavier then the organic ones..
I remember doing it, sitting down picking the best one out of my buddies batches and delidding them until we got one we didn't kill in the process.
That day we also delidded a nvidia nf2 chipset, not one of my boards, just a spare crap board.
It didn't survive, the whole idea was to see what the chip actually looked like, if it had a copper or silver plate over the core or not.
I don't remember if it did or nto but the silicone plastic lid, you could take a razor and jam it into the corner and and rip the lid right off it.
Didn't survive though like I said, if I had got enough experience doing it I would of did it to the abit and dfi boards, the abit was that crappy ver 2 or whatever though, kinda worthless, meh maybe not with a full on custom bios I guess, to me it wasn't worth my time, I was only interested in getting my hands on the 1st ver.
Whatever the boards name was now.

I used to have a gf4 ti4600 gainward golden sample that I turned into a quadro 900xgl, and then sanded down the core to it's copper base.
I was using zip ties to hold down a slot a heatsink to it though and one day I was trying to hard to get the heatsink on and sliped, busted off a bunch of smd's, had to permanently downclock the mem to use it .
That 4600 ti is an easy mod to quadro though, just bust off one resistor and it's done.
The 680 that I have now, if I remember right just needed 2 resistors busted off, took me a while to track them down though, I was kinda scared because its a custom pcb and no one else had done it yet .
I want another too to sli it, maybe sooner or later.

I have a gainward golden sample gf6800 gt, bios strap modded into a quadro fx 4000.
Wasn't the same as a real hard mod though, never did the hard mod like I going to.
I still have that card in my dfi nf2 lpb.
My lpa needs new caps on the cpu, caps are bulging.

I'm pretty much just ranting off, fun though thinking back .
I got like 3 pairs or so of good mem for it.
I had more, but this one pair of winbond, the newer stuff, not ch5 but newer, sucked big time (utt?).
Ive got another pair of utt or whatever it was called too, that I kept because it was good, I bought somebody's utt from the old dfi street forum and it was bunk, that's what I got rid of.
But I've got uccc, ch-5, I think I even got some bh-5 actually, I don't remember now.
I just remembered, I think was bh5 I found over a cousin's, I was like whoa I want this, and hes all like ok take it .
I never tested it actually, it was munchkin too I think, black heat spreader.

I used to have lot more samsung too.
Those were 256m sticks though.
That and some unbranded stick that I got to 560mhz with, I smashed all that with my dfi 939 board and cpu in a rage (plus my original lpb ).
I have kitfit1's board which works, needed capping almost right away though, and another one too in my closet I think was skinnies but doesn't post, looks like new though and someone was using a ss on it and screwed it up, it had that spray on crap on it around the socket I had to cleaned off).

I put used caps on the lpb :\, works ok, but not enough for a new wr.
A modded psu would be needed though to get those clocks again too.
Talking 280+ 1:1 on socket a prime 48hrs stable.

[Darxide]

I like how this has turned into a memories thread!
Here's what first got me into upgrading and self building.....
My first PC was store bought. I saved every penny I could for almost a year (poor student), and I bought an IBM Aptiva. It had a Pentium 166MMX, 16Mb of PC66 RAM, a 2Gb Quantum bigfoot HDD (5.25"), a 24x CD-ROM and onboard ATi Rage IIc graphics. It had Windows 95 OSR2 installed.
After about 6 months, I bought some extra RAM, a 32Mb module which bumped it up to 48Mb....and the difference was WOW! It booted so much faster, and ran so much smoother. That was it. Hooked lol.
I changed the CPU for a Cyrix MII 300, swapped the HDD to a 10Gb IBM Deskstar, added a discrete graphics card (Ati Rage 128Pro), and have never bought a pre made system since.

[Jethro]

We were the pioneers of tweaking pc's! Sooo many dead boards/cpus heheh

I actually enjoyed some very low level tweaks on the Ali chipsets but had the most experience with via for sure. I remember via's southbridges just plain sucked...

If memory serves me right my first pc was AMD 86mhz with 64k color vga! wooT That is if c64 doesnt count as PC, or dare i say TI 1000 even!?

Anyone remember connecting the bridges on socket A?

[NEOAethyr]

Look what I found in my closet .
I apologize for the lighting of the shots but it'll do.
It's a 450 afx.
She's a bit scoffed up but she probably still works just fine.
I did find one stick of 256m sdr elipida too, but none of my micron or anything, I might still have some decent ram I don't know though.
I found it looking for my pk-5 tim, which I never found :\, just my almost 10 years old as ceramic and even older as5.

I have alot of junk cpu's I guess, found 2 p4's, one I know is unlocked, because I used it once...
Some somewhat newer amd's.., I mean not like new new, but socket 754 and it looks like an am2 sempron (not sure if it's the really crappy one or what).
A couple junk socket a's, a mobile socket a (I've got 2 of those).

I did find my bh5, it's in my lpb with a stick of utt, both 512m.
I did notice the lpb has a bad cap now, a 12v next to the atx connector.
That's what I get for using used caps :\.

Anyways here's the pics of the k6-2.





Edit:
Oh, my 1st pc...
Or pc's...
3x ps2's, 64bit microchan ftw .
What was it, 20 meg drives lol, and some long @ss modems I never used but were sold with the systems way back when.
My mom bought them directly from ibm for a deal, I think $500 for all 3 at the time.

Most of my software at that time came from air force and weather service lol.
Once in a while we bought some stuff though, like win 3.11 when that came out, os/2, win95 (like 3 times even though we had like 4 copies on cdrom from ibm).
Crap like that .
I fav old school software.., xtree pro I think it was, not the gold ver I didn't really care for those updated vers.

The 386's weren't nothing really though, the 486's and p1's were where the action was at .
My cousin had a dual cpu 286 though.

Oh and does anyone remember computer shopper before it went to shiz?
Those things were huge .