Top Specs

Hey. I got an old computer (AMD K6-2 450mhz, 6GB hdd, 32mb ram) off a friend
last week for nothing. What I want to do is upgrade it just a little as the
hard drive is fried(I've put in an old 2gb I have and it worked fine). I was
thinking of gettin a hard drive and a bit more ram. BUT how can I find out
whats the maximum the motherboard can handle? Is there any program out that
will let me find this out?
Thanks.
Martin.

"Muttly" <muttly@iol.ie> wrote in message
news:bnr5l3$q6v$1@kermit.esat.net...
> Hey. I got an old computer (AMD K6-2 450mhz, 6GB hdd, 32mb ram) off a
friend
> last week for nothing. What I want to do is upgrade it just a little as
the
> hard drive is fried(I've put in an old 2gb I have and it worked fine). I
was
> thinking of gettin a hard drive and a bit more ram. BUT how can I find out
> whats the maximum the motherboard can handle? Is there any program out
that
> will let me find this out?
>
>
I've refurbished and sold quite a few of those. All would take up to 512MB
SDRAM (PC133 or PC100, 16Mx8 chips only), 80GB HDD was no problem, the
fastest CPU produced was 550MHz, ran Win2k or WinXP perfectly.
You may have to update the BIOS if considering HDD larger than 32GB.

"Muttly" <muttly@iol.ie> wrote in message
news:bnr5l3$q6v$1@kermit.esat.net...

" BUT how can I find out whats the maximum the motherboard can handle? Is
there any program out that will let me find this out? "


Use http://www.motherboards.org/moboidtools.html to identify the make and
model of the motherboard.

AMD K6-2's went into Socket 7 motherboards, and AMD produced 475Mhz, 500Mhz
and 550Mhz CPUs which were faster than the 450Mhz that you have. As to
whether it is worth upgrading the CPU, It obviously depends on how much you
can get a 550Mhz from eBay for. Quite a few people are after the 550Mhz
CPU, being the fastest CPU for the Socket 7, so you could have a few
bidding-wars on eBay. You can read how to overclock up to 600Mhz here:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20000713/

My old Socket 7 originally came with 64MB PC100, but would happily
clock-down 2 x 256MB PC133 SDRAM. Unfortunately it didn't have an AGP slot,
but you can get PCI graphics cards which more than match-up to the
gaming-power of a K6-2 550Mhz CPU.

As for hard drive specs, I'm sure that mine was either an UDMA / 33 or 66.
I never upgraded from the 13GB that it had, so i don't know what the maximum
it could take was. Anyway, all of this should be clear to you once you
identify your motherboard.