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This AMD K6 processor has the best clock-for-clock performance of all the K6's CPU's. It has 256KB L2 on-die full speed cache running at 400MHz and uses a 180nm manufacturing process. Unfortunately a big and fast L2 cache doesn't always mean 'high performance'. In this case the K6-III+ is quite a lot better compared to the normal K6-2 without L2 cache but compared to the K6-2+ (with 128KB L2 on-die full speed L2 cache) the differences are quite small. In general a K6-2+ 450MHz is just a tad faster than the K6-III+ 400MHz. It looks like that 128KB L2 cache is a just the boost that the K6 needed, but the extra 128KB L2 cache (256KB L2 cache in total) is not very effective anymore.

The K6-III+ is manufactured using a 180nm process just like the first Athlon XP and Pentium 4. The K6 was originally build for speeds in the neighbourhood of 166 to 233 MHz and with improved manufacturing processes it scaled to 400MHz - 500MHz depending on the quality of the wafer. Despite that the K6-III+ is manufactured with a 'modern' (modern for this type of CPU) it doesn't clock all the way up like the Athlon or Athlon XP did.The K6-III+ was released on 18 April 2000 and this model was produced in the 45th week of 2003! That's more than 3 years later and at that time the Pentium 4 was available at 3GHz. Why AMD build this processor so late is unknown to me.

Because the CPU runs at 1,6V (which the Gigabyte GA-5AX can supply) and only 400MHz it is surprisingly cool. I can run it with just a small heatsink and no fan at all. > Read more