AMD K6-300

• Support for the Accelerated Graphics Port Bus (AGP)

• Support for the 100MHz Front Side Bus

• Ability to run the PCI and AGP Buses at 33/66MHz respectively independently of the System Bus (FSB)

• Full Support for all Super7 CPU's (K6 3D)

When this announcement was made, the world was left waiting for Super7 boards to actually make it out on to the market.  The months flew by and empty promises from Acer Labs Inc (ALi) about their "killer" new Super7 chipset, the Aladdin V left many users turning to Intel for answers. 

What amazed most was the fact that VIA Technologies had completely forgone mentioning plans for a Super7 chipset at the time.   They were working off the success of their Socket-7 AGP solution, the VP3 chipset that didn't even match up with the 83MHz bus speed setting until recently, it was obvious that 100MHz was out of the question.  VIA managed to keep things quiet about their plans for the future of the dying Socket-7 market, but finally, just a few months ago, VIA managed to leak out some interesting information about their Mobile VP3 chipset...what would turn out to be the world's first Super7 chipset.

The MVP3 chipset was introduced to the world in a much lesser manner than the Aladdin V, everyone and their mother was boasting of an Aladdin V board in the works, in contrast very few manufacturers announced MVP3 based motherboards.  So one can imagine the surprise when the first stable motherboard at 100MHz happened to be a VIA MVP3 based motherboard.  Where are all the proposed Aladdin V boards?  Is it true that only K6-266/300 processors will work at the 100MHz bus speed?  What has been keeping us away from the 100MHz bus speed all this time...was it really our processors/RAM?  Or something else?

When AnandTech received its first MVP3 based motherboard a few weeks ago, the Shuttle HOT-591P, the initial experience was a bit disappointing, the lack of a working 100MHz setting overshadowed the outstanding performance...the chipset seemed to be reminiscent of the SiS 5591 whose lack of stability at the 100MHz setting prevented it from blowing the minds of those that used it.  The Shuttle board tested was a pre-production model, luckily a second MVP3 based motherboard made its way into the AnandTech Lab...this time the board was beyond impressive.

EPoX, known for their excellent and easy to configure VP3 based AGP Socket-7 board, the P55-VP3, managed to produce the world's first stable Super7 motherboard - the MVP3 based EP-MVP3C-M.  Not only did the MVP3C-M work at the 100MHz bus speed with the K6-300, it managed to work with the 266, 233, and 200 chips  not to mention the Pentium MMX - 233 (the 6x86MX 200 I had isn't very overclockable, so I need to get a 233 or higher before I can come to any further conclusions).

Armed with the fully operational 100MHz bus speed on the MVP3C-M from EPoX, AMD managed to pull some amazing benchmarks out of their hat with the K6...so without further adieu, let's get to the comparison.