Alternative Ways To Enhance The Voltage Regulator New

There are many ideas and discussions on how to enhance the GA-586HX 1.5x voltage regulator (VR) in order to keep it cool when running the K6-2 and K6-III CPUs. On various websites, wwwboards and newsgroups, there are ways that range from simply adding bigger heatsinks to completely replacing the VR. This page documents the VR enhancement efforts of other GA-586HX 1.5x owners, who have generously contributed their experiences.

Calling all fellow GA-586HX VR Enhancers!
E-Mail (hackedmobo@yahoo.com) what you did to enhance your GA-586HX VR to me, and I'll put it on my homepage here, including your name and email address. If you don't want your email address published, let me know. Please try to give a detailed description with diagrams. If you can provide photos, that would be great.

Irregular Regulators

1. Add A Rectifier In Front Of The VR

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1. Add A Rectifier In Front Of The VR

Contributed by : Kristian Regenstein
Email : k-regenstein@gmx.de
Date : December 21, 1999

Another way to keep the vr cool is to reduce the voltage already in front of the vr. This can be achieved by using a rectifier. A rectifier is usually used to generate DC from AC so don't be irritated by the polarity. These are the polarities you get if you supply AC to the AC pins. I got me the 25A model this should be quite enough and cost me only 7,-DM.

To connect the rectifier to the vr you have to cut pin 3 of the board. Cut it rather in the middle so that you can solder one wire to the part of the pin coming from the board and one to the pin 3 on the vr. These wires should be just as short as possible. Use wire of about 1mm in diameter. Depending on your cpu there will be about 10A going through (in case of the AMDK6-II 300 8.5A). After soldering the wires to the pins solder the wire coming from the board (this is the 5V power supply) to the (-) on the rectifier. The wire coming from the vr has to be soldered to the (+) on the rectifier. You should screw the rectifier somewhere to the frame of the computer abusing the frame as heatsink.

With my AMDK6-II 300 this worked well. The vr stayed cool and the rectifier got warm but not really hot. The idea behind this method is that on a diode you get a drop in voltage of about 0.6V that's rather independent of the current. In this case there are two diodes in row (parallel to two other diodes in row) giving a drop of 1.2V. So the regulator has to reduce voltage only by further 1.6V. In reality this could be even less. For example the power the board supplied to the rectifier dropped to 4.7V this giving 3.5V in front of the vr and leaving the vr only 1.3V to reduce. According to the datasheets of the vr it needs 1.5V to work properly but i did'nt encounter any problems so far.

Tip for Win95/98 users:
You can additionally use the tool CPUIdle to keep your cpu, your vr and the rectifier cool. This tool suspends the cpu if nothing is to do thus reducing the current. It doesn't seem to decrease performance. The tool is of no use if you are doing things that need all the power of the cpu like 3d-games, mp3-coding but while writing e-mail or things like this it keeps your rectifier really cool.

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Adrian
Last revised: April 19, 2000.