Can some PC-hardware-literate person tell me...

it "depends".

Yes the chip will fit however the motherboard has to be able to support a chip like that.

Only SOME of the socket 7 motherboards will support 100mhz bus speeds and support those higher speed socket 7 cpus.

If your motherboard is an ATX style motherboard and it is not an intel brand motherbooard (i do not know of any intel brand motherboards that supported the cyrix/amd/winchip only speeds of 266mhz and above on a socket 7 motherboard) then chances are, it might support the 300mhz k6.

Also a good rule of thumb is that if the old socket 7 motherboard is using dims (pc100 or pc66) then its a higher end socket 7 motherobard that will most likely support the higher speed cpus like the 300mhz k6.

Bascially the only surefire way of telling is to get the exact make/model number of the motherboard and go to the manufacturers website and see if the motherboard will support k6 cpus with 100mhz bus speeds (with or without a bios upgrade).

I am going to go out on a limb and say that if your current motherboard is one of those old AT style motherboards with 72 pin memory on it and it has an intel 233 chip, then most likely it will not support the 300mhz amd k6.

Also about 99 percent of the time, swapping socket 7 cpus is NOT just plug and play: (take one out and put another one in its place and it will be autodetected). On almost ALL of the socket 7 motherboards i ever saw (including the more recent asus socket 7 mobos that i have that support up to k6/550mhz cpu's ) almost always had jumper settings for frontside bus, multipler, and (extremely important) the voltage.

They are not plug and play like newer amd athlon chips where you can rip out a duron 1200mhz and replace it with an athlon xp1800 and it just works. New stuff autodetects, old stuff, you need to do your homework.

You'll need it. If the computer's a generic white box there should be a manufacturer's name and model number printed on it somewhere. Chances are quite good the manufacturer has it in PDF form buried on their website somewhere. Even if it's not "generic" you have a pretty good chance of getting somewhere by looking. (I discovered firsthand, for instance, that a number of cheap HP machines use generic ASUS motherboards with a few components missing.)

Lacking that, quick "factoids":

1: If the chipset says "Intel" on it, forget 100Mhz bus speed. Intel never made "Super Socket 7" boards. VIA and ALi were the big names to look for there.

2: AMD K6-2s are not multiplier locked, so it *is* possible to run one in a 66Mhz board anyway. However:

3: To do so, the board has to support a 2.2v core voltage setting. Pentium MMX uses a 2.9v core, and most non-Super Socket 7 motherboards don't officially support voltages lower then that. Even if it does, Socket 7 isn't like Socket 370 (Celeron/PIII) or later, in that it does *not* have any support for automatically detecting the power requirements of the inserted chip. So this is what you need the manual for, setting the voltage jumpers.

Once you know your motherboard model, incedentally, google the heck out of it. Sometimes you'll find some hacker-overclocker-boy discovered that setting the jumpers in some non-documented way gives you voltage settings the manufacturer didn't verify. Of course, if you fry your new chip it's your own darn fault for trusting what you read on the Internet.

4: As a final note, remember that among Socket 7 CPUs Intel's chips usually had the best IPC, particularly for floating point. Don't be overly disappointed if after going through all the trouble to get a 300Mhz K6-2 installed it turns out it's barely faster then what you replaced.

Anyway.

--Peace

Most of the branded motherboards (like compaq, gateway, dell, etc) are limited in their upgradablity. They didn't design the motherboard or bios to be able ot be upgraded, all they cared about was that the motherboard ran fine with a particular chip that they threw on it. By that i mean they were building 100,000 pentium 233 systems all using the same motherboard and cpu so they didn't care that the motherboard was usable with other chips so they didn't necessarly put in the upgradablity functionality into the system (bios).

I know that a lot of Gateway systems used what looked like to be standard Intel motherboards but they had different bios's which were not upgradeable by the bios upgrades put out by intel. You had to go to Gateway's website to get the bios update. if you tried using the intel bios updater, it would just fail and give you an error.

Basically i'm just saying, don't get your hopes up as to how fast you can go with this motherboard.

I pulled a K6-2 333Mhz Socket 7 chip out of a dead Aptiva and put it in a generic box, with no problems at all. What will limit your processor speed, however, is your jumper settings. Processor speed is determined by using the FSB (Front Side Bus) speed and the Clock Multiplier. Multiply these two numbers together and you get your processor speed. If your machine is 233Mhz stock, there's a good chance you're limited to a 66Mhz bus. Conversely, at 66Mhz FSB, you have a Clock multiplier of 3.5 (66*3.5 = 231Mhz). On those older boards, 3.5-4 is usually the limit for a Clock Multiplier (meaning, theoretically, you could get ~266Mhz out of the board). With a 300Mhz processor, you *should* have no problems running it at 266Mhz. However, some motherboards cannot be run at their fastest clock multiplier/FSB combination, because certain components on the board simply cannot handle that much speed. Usually, your serial ports and onboard video that provides the most problems, although I have seen integrated sound and ethernet controllers go wonky when being pushed too hard. However, I have never run into any problems with running components slower than stock. (I ran the aforementioned K6-2 333Mhz chip at 187Mhz because it was as fast as I could reliably run the motherboard.) Your mileage may vary, but, from my experience, K6-2 chips are very tolerant of running below spec.

Cheers,

The Czar

I don't think I'm different,
Or in any way unique.
Think about yourself for a minute,
Then you'll find the answer in it:
Everyone's a freak.