Avoid cryix like the plague, or fit a well over spec heatsink and fan a layer of dust on the heatsink (on the systems I had) and it becomes unstable. Skips coment about them being toast if the fan slows down really doesnt surprise me.

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Mine was the M2 core (6x86MX-PR233). It was intended to run a 2.5 X 75Mhz...sound like we're overclocking here? Well, in that particular series of M2 chips, one ran at 60Mhz, one at 66Mhz, one at 75 and one at 83. I have no doubt they were cut from the same wafer and the end user was simply told to set motherboard jumpers in order to make the chip perform as advertised. That pretty much explains the cause of the heat issue with Cyrix chips. Here's what mine did over the years I owned it: Dust build up on the fan and heatsink caused random shutdown after 20-30 minutes of use. Fan spinning at slower than max speed caused lockup within 5 minutes. Machine would reboot and be ok for another 5 minutes... Fan not running at cold start; machine would not boot. Fan stopped while playing a game...end of Cyrix chip. I popped in an Intel 166MMX, reset the motherboard jumpers and it's been running fine since (still doing daily duty today). The Cyrix M2-300 (6x86MX-PR300) runs at 3.5 X 66Mhz or 233Mhz, has 64Kb L1 cache and no onboard L2 cache. It was one of the last socket 7 chips they made. The various K6-2 300 chips are all a better choice. Most are intended to run at 100Mhz fsb and one, I believe, at 66Mhz x 4.5. To finally answer your question, the AMD will outperform the Cyrix if your motherboard supports 100Mhz fsb. If you find one of the 66Mhz AMD chips, it will also outperform the Cyrix. Cyrix made computing more affordable for the masses but most of us found the chips to be underperforming and fragile. All in all, they were a real disappointment. Skip

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The AMD K6-2 is by far the best choice, & as I pointed out, if you use the "2x as 6x" trick, you can run at least a 400 (6 x 66), possibly a 450 (6 x 75). And if 83mhz FSB is "officially" supported, you could run a 500 (6 x 83)...don't know if your EDO RAM could handle that or not though. Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

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One other thought...your board would have to support the lower CPU voltage of the K6-2...usually 2.2v or 2.4v Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

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Good point jam. As I recall, motherboards built to support a Cyrix processor had a slew of jumpers to change cpu voltage so you could run an Intel, AMD, Cyrix and others. My board was a typical no name taiwan built board and would accept about anything I plugged into the socket. Skip

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See Oldie Tuning at Tom's Hardware, http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/20000725/ . Different motherboard, but the same concepts apply.

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Even though I LOVE my old Cyrix machine I think you should go for the AMD K6-2. The Cyrix processors do run very hot I have a massive heatsink on my 6x86 133MHz 166+ cpu and it still gets pretty warm. I am not one bit surprised that the PC ran better with Windows 2000. I have a P2 266MHz which was sluggish on Win 98 so I put Win XP on it and it had a new burst of life even with 128Mb of RAM. I think Win XP uses the hardware more effecently than 98 does. I think Win XP was unfairly labled a recource hog. Mattwizz3 : ) AMD K-7 600MHz & Asus K7v 256Mb SDRAM 80Gb WDC, 8Mb Buffer 128Mb ASUS Radeon A9550 Cyber Drive CD-RW DVD Combo

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I still find it hard to believe Win2K or WinXP (which are practically the same thing anyway) would run better than Win98 on a 266mhz/128mb system. Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

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My fan died and I've ran the PC for about 6 months w/o one and now I get no POST beep

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Have you tried running 2000 or XP on a machine like that before jam? I was very surprised that it ran faster too, but if you are bored enough to read the stuff on the screen during setup (like me) starting up faster is actually a feature. And it runs faster in windows too. Mattwizz3 : ) AMD K-7 600MHz & Asus K7v 256Mb SDRAM 80Gb WDC, 8Mb Buffer 128Mb ASUS Radeon A9550 Cyber Drive CD-RW DVD Combo

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I took my Packard bell Apart, and I recived a Pentium 2 233 MMX Compaq Deskpro 4000, which I am typing this on now. It came from a doctor's office. They were throwing them in the dumpster. It has SOOO many ports. AGP Video, SCSI Port, USB 2.0, Infared Port, 2 Paralell, 2 Serial, built-in Ethernet, and 3 other wierd ports I cannot describe. It has 64 MB RAM which is going to be upgraded to MAX= 384 MB SDRAM, a 3.0 GB HDD-Too noisy and tiny, so I put a 6.4 GB Fujitsu in. A 24X CD-ROM, getting a burner--The CDROM is cool though because it doesn't have a tray and only a slot that you put the CD in an iBook. It came with 95B, I put 98 in and runs fine. I basicly upgraded everything! Well I'm happy with this one and it seems faster than my old Cyrix MII 300 Above.

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