overclocking an old PC....

I have an old Compaq 5240 that has served me well. But it's starting to get the need for speed. It has a 400mhz. AMD K6-2 processor. I would like to put a 550mhz processor in it and bump it up to about 600mhz. It will probably require a few flipped dip switches on the motherboard, but I don't know which ones. Nor do I know if this is completely possible. I've been told a 550mhz. is the max. processor this board will take. Any thoughts???

It depends on the motherboard. You might be able to put a K62+ or K6III+ (those are the low current ones made for laptops) in one. The regular K6-2 chip does not take overclocking well at all. The only K6-III+ chips are well over a hundred bucks, not nearly worth it. You might be able to find a K6-2+ chip for a lot less though, or a normal K6-III. The standard K6-2 and K6-III aren't as overclockable, but the + versions don't work with every motherboard. Some just require a BIOS flash to make it possible. 600mHz would require a larger bump in voltage nad a good cooling system. If you want to try and yoru motherboard only shows a 5.5 multipier, try settign the jumper to 2x. In many that would actually set it to 6x. There are also software programs to change the multiplier. You'd still have to use the jumpers to change the FSB.
Take a look on www.amdzone.com

i oc like a mad man but sadly i started to mess with pc,s before dip switches it is done in bios now . but i have to say if ya mobo dont have a pistion a dip for 600 ya cant do it . het why dont ya get a new mobo and cpu ya can get em cheap. but a course new mobos require drr most likely

I second what raggie33 says. Although it would be nice to reuse the current motherboard, the rarity of that chip speed will drive up costs. Its probably cheaper in the long run to upgrade both the motherboard and CPU.

Directron has a K6-2 533 mhz. processor for $25. Does anybody know if a simple processor will work in this mobo.

For what it's worth, the mobo is a Compaq 043 Ch. I haven't found that much info on it, so I don't know what my options are.

What is the maximum bus speed of the mobo? Considering it is a compaq, it is not likely to go over 100MHz, that is the major limit.

Another option is to pick up a Biostar motherboard with the nForce2 chipset, they run around $50. It will support AMD Athlons, Athlon XPs, mobile Athlon XPs and Duron processors. The boards run around $50 and a cheap Duron is around $35.
That all depends if you are using a standard ATX case and have at least a 250W power supply. Good luck

You won't even notice the difference. I've spent years doing everything from a pc shop to an admin of hundreds of servers, to supporting old boxes I pulled from the dumpster for family. Sticking a faster processor in an old machine will simply make the fast processor wait faster on the rest of the slow hardware. The bus speed, ram speed, and hard disk speed effect the overall speed of a pc more than the processor. If you want to make the box faster feed it a bunch of ram. Windows has a design flaw in that it wants to keep as much ram free as possible and will spend a lot of time swapping pages of memory off to disk. Adding more ram helps to prevent it from swapping so much and the disk is the slowest part of the system.

For $350-400 occasionally during sales, you can buy a completely new computer with a 2.7 GHZ celeron, monitor, and printer, with xp installed... with the deals out there these days spending $50 or $100 on something outdated just isn't worth it unless you just do it as a hobby.

With the later generation of K6-2 and K6-3 some method of detecting overclocking of the bus multiplier was added to the CPU and it would automatically slow itself when it detected too high of a multiplier setting. The only way to overclock is to increase the bus speed. A 400 MHz AMD CPU would be running a 100 MHz bus multiplied by 4, so it likely is already running as fast as you're going to. The 550 MHz CPU's used 100 x 5.5 multipler. I doubt Compaq engineered a capacity to run their K6 mobo's over 100 MHz bus speed.

Wow. You want to upgrade from a K6-2 400mhz.

I'm on a K6-1 166mhz. as I type this. If there was ever a machine that needed it, this is it. I can't do much but read CPF and email.

But I be a poor poor boy...

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the info. This is the first computer I ever actually purchased. So it's a little sentemental. It's not nearly as fast as other PC's I've built, but it's O.K. for surfing and word processing. Right now, it's running XP home with 384 megs of pc100 ram. 320 gigs of HD space(I got a really good deal on a couple of HD's). And a usb 2.0 PCI card. Performance is pretty good considering it's a 400mhz. PC.

I've built several PC's but never actually overclocked one. Is the performance any better on the likes of intense games or extreme graphics. Overall, is it worth the cost to say....add water cooling? Or would a faster processor or better graphics card be better and more stable?

Hey Playboy......you really DO need a new PC /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/ooo.gif

im into pc,s fast as i can get em but i fianyl gave up on useing em to play games geting a xbox as i mentioned in another thread . it is a crazy video game system it has dvd player a 10/10ehternet 700 mhz cpu a nvideo video chip and ya can hack it to turn it into a pc all at a cost of 150

Hi Rag,

posted a link on your other thread. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif